Economic fetishism

What does "reifying" mean?

No, this claim is absurd. Unlike gravity, economics is a purely human institution, and can be changed by humans. Not only that, the current rules that govern economics are hardly the ancient laws from time immemorial that lolberts would like to pretend that they are. Capitalism, as the dominant economic system, is roughly 200 years old.

The truth is that they've basically turned the capitalist market into a sort of deity.

It's the only thing that holds this view together. For instance, the idea that without the profit motive, people will do crappy work. Well, actually basic logic would imply the opposite. Since profit is getting more out of the system than you put in, it follows that the less you put in, the bigger the profit, for which one can conclude that the profit motive actually encourages crappy work, so long as you can get away with it.

Fundamentally wrong on many levels. First off, what is a crappy job? Is working as a cashier a crappy job? Well, not everyone wants to be a rocket scientist. People would ultimately fill those positions because its not demanding. And some people like "crappy jobs"

I used to love being a welder. I didn't get paid that much because I was pretty new, I left work sore as fuck, covered in burns and molten metal shards. But I loved it because it was challenging.

Also I don't understand this idea that communism doesn't produce incentive. The idea is you are simply paid directly for your labor, there is no surplus value taken off the top of what you produce. Marx speculated using a voucher type system for compensation.

Further, this ignore that eventually most of these positions will simply be automated anyway. IDK what /liberty/ is but I wouldn't listen to the pro-cap arguments.

I hope you are not an advocate of "gift economy" nonsense, OP. It's Motte and Bailey. They first talk about people getting free shit with no strings attached, when criticized they move the definition of giving gifts to people having expectations of each other and informal tit for tat, when still criticized they make some vague claims about making that tit-for-tat stuff more formal - and when the bully is gone, they go back to FREE SHIT 4 ERRYBODY LMAO.

The guy you quote is also drowning in Motte and Bailey shit. When he talks about profit motive he means capitalism. When you interrogate him about it, he will say something like profit motive just means people like doing things for their own individual benefit. He will not pull some amazing mathematical proof out of his ass that it follows that the means of production have to be privately owned. It's useless discussing with them.

In short, people need to be forced to engage in crappy work by threatening them with starvation. Why not just strive towards the automation of crappy work instead?

What is Motte and Bailey?

pls respond

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reify#Verb
(transitive) to regard something abstract as if it were a concrete material thing

Thanks, I thought it was some kind of Marxist jargon

Naw man, reification quite literally means being spooked by whatever it is that's being reified

People gotta do crap work now, what's the difference?

1: You overestimate people's urge to rebel. Take 8cuck for example… you got a wheelchair bound drug lord who uses his money to go to the Filipino islands and fuck underage hookers… does anyone care or do anything about it? Why would they suddenly do something about socialism?

2: Even if they did, they'll just be right back where they started only with even less and more unappreciated. Go ahead and be a dumb faggot about it. This is why I believe in self determination of the nation state and Juche had the right idea of national communism. Because white people like being dumb and evil so fuck them, no global revolution. Just case by case basis.

a rhetorical tactic where you withdraw from a radical position to a more defensible one and pretend they're both the same

A word on crappy jobs, and why they exist. An example from my own field of a crappy job that would seem to necessitate the cash incentive would be a sewer cleaner. One thing they have to do is to climb into CSOs (combined sewer overflows, basically where the excess sewerage is dumped into rivers, lakes etc) and clean off the gross shit (literally) that gets caught on scumboards (floaters) and on the bottom of silting ponds (sinkers), as well as the screens to the outflow which catch any other gross solids. Obviously it's very smelly, hard work and you can't imagine somebody willingly going down there and doing it. The most simplistic socialist solution is to automate the cleaning, which does happen in some cases. However it's worth thinking about why we have these sort of systems in the first place, why our society has a system whereby clean water is pumped to households, used to flush shit away and then added to sewers along with rainwater which has been collected at source, which is then all transported in the sewers back to the water treatment plant to be then sent back to the households. Anyone from even the most cursory glance could see that there is a degree of redundancy to this system and would ask why we can't use the rainwater to flush the shit and thus reduce the amount of water in the sewers and thus the amount of sewerage that gets dumped into natural watercourses.

The reason why this doesn't happen is that the government protects the right of private companies to not have to care about the common good. Water utility companies only have to transport the water, and the more infrastructure they have the bigger their subsidies so more sewers=more money. House builders only have to make a profit and are allowed to not give a shit about anything if it will affect their profits, so they do what is the cheapest for them, neglecting any long-term savings for the community that could come from having a more intelligent drainage system.

The end result is a system which is clearly contradictory and necessitates crappy jobs (which ofc is not a problem for capitalism, more jobs, more growth etc). My point is that if we were to plan for the entire network, instead of particularising a natural system into saleable industries which are then optimised for their own profit, we could create a system based on sustainable drainage which benefits all and most importantly removes the needs for these crappy jobs. At the end of the day, the sort of people who make these assertions about "fundamental laws of economics/human nature" buy into the liberal necessitarian viewpoint that fails to see that there is a programmatic possibility in society, which allows us to go beyond these self imposed restrictions i.e. spooks.

That sounds just like every ancap I've ever talked to.

...

This is a good post.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(Marxism)

It is literally just suggesting that such a complicated form of organization is actually going against the fundemental laws of reality.

It's not so much that it's impossible, it's that capitalism is unsustainable and impossible, but it takes time to self destruct making consumption on the levels we're currently presenting no longer fit and totally void.

Communism is possible, in fact, perhaps with the levels we currently consume. It will take time, however.

But acting like the market is actually the natural default of things is hilarious nonsense I can't believe anyone still believes

But it's literally a shitpost

even if market capitalism were 'natural' what is that fallacy called where nature = good? I've been trying to think of it for weeks, maybe there isn't one word for it.

Appeal to nature. But they are not claiming that it's simply natural, but that it's a law of nature that only capitalist economies can work and everything else is bound to fail.

/liberty/ and crowd fall into the trap of believing economics is an unmoving and universal science with laws that are rooted in some manner of universal truths. This simply isn't the case though: economics is first and foremost a framework for understanding material exchanges between people and communities given the circumstances of the society these exchanges take place under. The early modern economists like Smith and Ricardo understood this, even when they were the ones that transformed economics into a field of study independent from other fields like morality and politics; economics is a tool for models and understanding, not natural law.

For example, trying to apply modern economic theories to historical economies shows that our understanding of how economics operates is very much rooted in our capitalist world. Take feudalism: there were no large global (or even national in many cases) markets that encompassed a near totality of economic exchanges. Most people were not legally able to move around and sell their goods outside of their local communities as well, meaning economies were highly localized and thus often operated on different principles. Additionally, while money did exist, most people did not use it outside of it being an abstract tool for assessing the value of commodities. Actual money generally is only used if the state is ensuring that the supply of money is consistent/widespread and that same state demands that taxes be paid in that currency. Most feudal lords required taxes be paid as a portion of the product created by the individual's labor or as a percentage of time that individual dedicates themselves to state work, thus when combined with highly localized economies, most people didn't carry physical coinage. Most people thus operated primarily on credit economies of varying degrees of informality, with debts often times being paid through abstract compensations paid back over more flexible periods of time. Coinage or other currencies were usually only used by nobles and high-tier merchants, people who were expected to conduct large-scale exchanges with people that were either entirely unknown or hostile in such a way that credit would not be feasible.

it seems to me a crazy conclusion to make that it is a law of nature that only capitalist economies can work. Where did they get this idea? I have to think it must have been in an intro in some populat randian book?

I guess this is the same crowd that will always tell you, with a smug look like they were the first to think of it, that 'communism is a great idea, but human nature would have to be changed'.

Can we do a series on /leftpol/ Where we all shared the arguments capitalists have given up we didn't know how to respond to, and teach each other the right answers?

This is the post to end this thread

With the absolutely perfect webm to go with it

… so it means you're being spooked?

Yup pretty much exactly

The economic "facts" liberals spout are based on the assumption that the actors in their economic system are always rational, self interested, and perfectly informed. They claim their field is a science, but they form their theories under idealized conditions which have never and will never exist in the real world, then perform their experiments with a sample size of one and no control group.

The simple fact is that rational, self interested, well informed human beings do not exist, and human beings who have even one of those qualities are in the minority. Human beings are intuitive, emotional, communal creatures, who love, form attachments, and sacrifice for one another, all the while stumbling through life with mud in our eyes, and cannot with a lifetime of learning fully comprehend even a narrow field of study.

BTW, you should read this book. It's history/anthropology, not economic theory, but it will disabuse you of the notion that markets are a natural law. It was written less than 10 years ago, with an engaging narrative style with modern audiences in mind. I promise it's not a dull slog written for 19th century German academics like most of the theory posted here.

They will tell you that communism is a horrible idea.

This whole attitude reminds me of that Marx quote that goes something like "It is the tendency of the vulgar economist to designate the fundamental laws of Capitalism as the fundamental laws of nature."

The reality is that these people are approaching this from a completely different perspective from every other economic school. Austrians use a deductive method to conduct economics. The convenience of this is if they are shown empirical data that contradicts their viewpoint, they can designate it an outlier that doesn't contradict the "logic" of their theory. Mises claims the axiom "man acts" is a synthetic apriori axiom. This shows just how philosophically bankrupt Mises was. Synthetic apriori axioms structure your worldview, "man acts" is an empirical observation. To designate it as a universal law, it requires recourse to empirical observation; how does man act? What acts are intentional? What about mentally ill, or malformed individuals?

Of course, Rothbard later admitted that Mises axiom was in fact a synthetic aposteriori axiom. Unfortunately, this hasn't stopped Austrians from maintaining their position that they don't have to prove shit.

In other words, showing them a history of economics book, an empirical study on the relevance of the calculation problem in socialist countries or evidence that the market at any given point in time is filled with millions of prices that don't reflect supply and demand makes no difference. Austrian economics is more akin to a cult than it is an intellectually honest attempt at deductive economics.

Do you have more on how Mises was wrong? I have no idea what a "synthetic apriori axioms" is but I want to piss off libertarians.

While wolfe is a smart man his presentation is full of appeals to emotion and idpol. I'm not actually a fan of this webm.

First you need to move beyond simply measuring the worth of a society, by its gdp. I would think this would be self evident, but somehow it's not. Much of the United States gdp for example is the result of wasteful consumerism, that is not and will never be sustainable. They produce a lot of "stuff" but most of it is useless garbage that noone needs and it is at the cost of long hours, wasteful use of rescources and requires pillaging the third world. Successful application of communism would not have all of the luxuries capitalism at it's peak, however the average citizen whould have more power in determining hisor her future. Obviously the bourgeoisie and elites will lose their vast influence and power, but everyone else stands to benefit, not only in that country, but other countries that will no longer be forced into near constant war, and people of the future who will still inherent natural resources instead of content sized trash heaps.

Both economics and gravity are forces, and we don't fully understand either.
But we know a hell of a lot more about gravity.

Arguing that one shouldn't try to alter the economic system because "The laws of economics" say so at this stage is like arguing one should never build a rocket because the "laws of gravity" say it will fall back to earth.

Truly the naked man of the social sciences, read this OP it is very good post Keynesian/Lite Marxian economical book.

youtube.com/watch?v=GpR11AY5-gk

Laws of economics are manmade, Even laws of the universe are man made concepts which can be broken or bent to your will.

People will have free time to do what they want.

Why not. 3D printing will eventually erase the need for money. You can even print food. I am not talking about Plastic printing, I am talking about Molecular printers.

Profit motive is a capitalist Idea, there have been studies that showed that people will do do just as much if not better work for free if they can get recognition for it. when you pay someone to do something they will give you just enough effort to do it but not more than what they are willing to give.

Gravity is non existent. it is not real, it is a figment of the imagination. "gravity" is only buoyancy, mass, weight. It can be easily overcome if you understand how to manipulate these things.

Capitalism is almost over, the world will have to abolish capitalism or destroy itself.

The profit motive doesn't really exist.

sex motive > profit motive
social standing motive > profit motive
power motive > profit motive

Into the trash.

*redefines all of those as "forms of profit"*
checkmate marxists.

Where?

NICE TRY ANCAP FAGGOT
He posted this fucking shit on /liberty.
I'm not a stalinist but all ancaps should gulaged ASAP.

oops

didn1t watch it correctly :(

wat

I'm drunk. I thought he shopped it. Shouldn't do this again.

Exactly this. What makes being a cashier a crappy job is that it pays next to nothing, requires you to pretend to like people who treat you like shit, and puts you in a dehuminizing corporate uniform. Cashiering is not a crappy job in itself. Capitalism makes it crappy.

The same could be said of other supposedly crappy jobs. What makes warehouse work crappy? You get paid shit and worked like a dog. What makes construction shit? You get paid nothing and worked like a dog. What makes farming shit? You work your ass off and get hardly any return despite the tremendous amount of value you create. These jobs would be sweet if capitalism did not make them shit.

Basically, Kant expanded on several types of axioms. "Synthetic Apriori" axioms were supposed to reconcile the fact that phenomena like cause and effect possessed no necessity, necessity was an abstraction made by us. Kant posited there were innate ideas in our mind that structured our worldview. Synthetic was thought to only be aposteriori, but he proved it could be apriori as well.

So Mises took Kants ideas and concluded if he could structure economics rooted in one of these fundamental axioms, he could come up with a completely deductive economics as opposed to the way economics had been conducted until then, as a combination of both adduction and deduction. The problem was his synthetic apriori "axiom" was actually an empirical observation. It wasn't apriori, it was aposteriori. So that meant there was no justification for denying empirical observation, but that didn't stop Mises. Hayekians are slightly more tolerable, but the internet Rothbardians you find on /liberty/ are more cultist than they are students of economics.

bump