Empirical Marxism

don't force me to quote Lichtenstein

And what practical, useful conclusions have you fuckers managed to draw from your half-century of bloviating over these topics to the nigh-complete detriment of hardcore analysis of the economic base of society? "I'll take 'Fuck Fucking All' for a billion, Trebek"

Don't act like I'm saying we all need to drop everything and spend the rest of our lives writing math textbooks. I'm saying that your mountains of precious studies on superstructural relations have done very little to aid the real movement that is to abolish the present state of things.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Revolution
etc. etc.

Pic very related

Pretty sure Lenin both knew and wrote about economics. Also pretty sure Soviet Union produced great mathematicians physicist etc

Who needs economics amirite bruh? All about that culture war, dont be a brocialist rite

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fuck you for forcing me to quote a trotskyist
At first sight, it would seem obvious that a logical system based on a static view of the world – as it is alleged of FL – would have few if any practical consequences. On the other hand, it would appear equally clear that a different logical system based on the opposite view of reality – as it is also claimed of DL – should have countless practical applications in science and technology.

Oddly enough, the exact opposite of this is the case: DL has no discernible practical or scientific applications, and has featured in none of the advances in the natural or physical sciences (and arguably none even in the social sciences) – ever. Worse still: DL has made no contribution to technological innovation.

In stark contrast, FL has played a key role in the development of science and mathematics, and has featured in countless applications in technology and the applied sciences.

Indeed, one excellent example (among the many) of the impact of FL on technology is the development of computers. Their origin goes back many centuries, but advances in control technology (in the 18th century) and mathematical logic (post 1850) proved to be decisive. The invention of Boolean and Fregean Logic, the Mathematical Logic of Russell, Whitehead, Hilbert, Peano, von Neumann and Church (etc.) – along with the logico-mathematical work of Alan Turing – all helped make possible the development of these machines. FL has not only contributed to the evolution of software and of computer languages in general, the principles of Propositional Calculus govern the operation of all standard processors.

In addition, there are numerous other examples of the practical applications of FL, ranging from Cybernetics to Code Theory, and from Linguistics to Game Theory and Discrete Mathematics. The question is: Can DM-theorists point to a single successful application of DL in, or to, technology, or in the natural and physical sciences? The answer is reasonably plain: they can't. But, this glaring failure becomes all the more revealing when it is remembered that dialecticians never tire of telling us that their 'logic' is superior to FL when it is applied to the material world.

Now, only the terminally naive will imagine that any of the above will have the slightest effect on dialecticians, or stop them saying the same erroneous things about FL, year in, year out.

As we noted above, the Heraclitean Flux has no control over these, its most inconsistent progeny.

Fuck off idiot, those revolutions were won by the real movement of the workers. It would be the height of arrogance to claim that anyone's fucking philosophy won those revolutions. Besides, basement dwelling mathematicians may not have won anything, but their systematic denigration at the hands of politicians certainly certainly helped lose at least one revolution:

nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/how-the-computer-got-its-revenge-on-the-soviet-union

ALSO, what the fuck makes you think I'm denigrating dialectics? Is it the fact that I use the OP's very borad criticism of "continental philosophy" as my jumping off point? If so you're thicker than I would have anticipated. I'm criticising the wholesale retreat from dialectics, science, math, and reason conducted by philosophers on the Left in the past 50 years. I'm obviously not including Marx the continental philosopher here, as I have nothing but respect for the practical insights his empirically-focussed work produced. I am talking about cunts like Sartre and Lacan and Gramsci and so on, seeing as I maintain that they have rendered fuck-all aid to the revolutionary movement.

Also this is correct:

We know perfectly well the limitations of mathematical and quantitative reasoning, do you realise that your stable of assholes already reached the limits of vague handwaving and purely qualitative reasoning decades ago?

Not liking critical theory is one thing, denigrating an entire field of incredibly rich and useful philosophy is not. On top of that, thinking the answer to critical theory is economism and "muh STEM" is fucking retarded beyond belief.

the pseudoscience of intellectuals is not the 'basis' of those revolutions, it's just a catch-all, falsifiable religion to disguise shitty ideas. dialectics are the philosophical equivalent of phrenology, if you believe they're relevant in any way it's because you don't actually understand them.

Well the solution certainly isn't 'more critical theory', and it sure as fuck isn't 'let's get into another slapfight about North Korea, because the last one was so fucking productive'. I happen to think more economism and more STEM-types might balance out you arty know-nothing, do-nothing faggots. Who knows, we might actually get something fucking well done!

*unfalsifiable

So can you summarize how you would define the labour theory of value in a way that makes it empirical? I've sometimes thought a good approach would be to define it as the market prices that *would* emerge in a certain kind of idealized market, like one without artificial monopolies created by "intellectual property" and with the feature porky economists call "perfect competition", along with the idea that all forms of labor can be learned by any worker (no special kinds that require rare talents that the average adult can't pick up with practice). So, the extent to which real-world prices depart from labor values could then be a measure of how much the real economy differs from these real conditions, and this would still allow real-world prices to be at least somewhat similar to ideal labor-values.

meant to write "differs from these ideal conditions"

I haven't got the citation on me, but one of the papers in OP's link is a study where they point out that the prices for goods can be accurately predicted by the SNLT for their production.

So yeah, demonstrating that prices convergence on SNLT is how they empirically proved the LTV

shig

What do you mean "convergence"? If prices were based purely on the socially necessary labor time there would be no surplus labor, so how would capitalists make a profit? Are you talking about the long-term trend of falling profits?

Understanding math doesn't make you a technocrat user, besides the Left seems to have developed its own retarded philosophy-student version of technocracy without mathematicians anyway. How else to explain Lacan, Negri, etc, if not as people writing deliberately impenetrable texts to prevent popular understanding of their ideas? Not to mention the whole lefty thinkpiece industry-as-fishbowl.

Sorry it's late, yeah no I didn't mean prices converge on SNLT alone, that would of course leave no room for surplus. Tiredbrain can't remember what they found prices did though, beyond the fact that whatever it did btfo the LTV haters. I will dig up the citation tomorrow.

I already know math and physics and can say without a doubt that it is extremely autistic (as is continental philosophy).

So basically, fuck math then? I mean my point is no one would ever say fuck reading and writing and being literate, why say it about math and being quantitatively literate? bunch of /lit/lords I swear

this

Hey guys you want to see how to trigger Analytical autists? It's really easy it only requires one sentence. Ready? There's multiple kinds of logic in the world.

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OP Here. Its a better beginner language which is why its in the guide. Also python is used in most Data Analytics/Machine learning and by major outfits like google/youtube. Most likely, any performance intensive parts of a planning system like the matrix operations would be written in a lower level language like C/C++

Wow, that's pretty degrading to our autistic brothers and sisters. There's nothing wrong with being autistic.

Never said there isn't more than 1 type of logic, but do you really think cultural handwavers like Zizek couch their ideas in a materialist dialectic? No its a bunch of psychoanalysis and pop culture. I mean, its entertaining and sometimes insightful, but we need to go beyond that to have a solid left philosophy

I never said I disagree with this extremely autistic endeavor. I believe in actually posing a model of now a new communist society COULD be run, even if it wouldn't be the reality history creates. Running into a revolution with absolutely no idea of how to run the society the day afterwards is opportunism at its best.

Regardless, constructing that model is, of course, autistic.

Hi guys, this is tangentially related, but I'd like to learn coding and don't know where to start. In September I'm going to some week-long training course in R for graduate school, but I'd like some experience beforehand.

What language should I learn, Python? From the book in the OP? What should I code as a project to help build my skills?

OP here, I'm a 'stem' student. I would recommend learning Python as a first language, its a bit easier. R is similar to python but focused on statistics. The book in OP "think python" is pretty good for beginners, i think you can find a pdf free online. Also check out:

quora.com/What-are-the-best-resources-for-learning-Python

You gotta be persistent, coding is a bit like math, takes some practice even if you don't get it at first. Good luck :)

Thanks for these resources. I'm a 'STEM' student myself, but since it's such a broad field, I cannot code.

My final question is whether learning C before Python is like reading Marx before Lenin. That is, does C provide a foundation on which to build a greater understanding of Python, or does perhaps learning Python first distort your understanding of concepts more clearly demonstrated by learning C.

There's no such relationship between the two.

Wonderful. I will begin my Python journey.

Have fun!

Internet-based stuff is fun. Write an auto-downloader for your favorite fap material.

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Is economism like scientism - ie. take a field of study which is essential for humanity and turn it into an insult because you enjoy being ignorant?

Also, the Holla Forums-tier jpegs don't really help your cause.

No, you're not getting it.

How there can be a "Marxist economics" in the first place is what I would like to know. Marx's work was a critique of this false form of thought. Let's look into the nature of capital as Marx presented it. Workers don't just produce values as the political economists thought, they produce the capital relationship which separates the workers from the conditions of production - which belongs to the capitalist. The life-activity of workers becomes alien to them, meaning they are alienated from themselves. This (alienation) is not a feeling loosely resembling stomach ache brought about by exploitation as your average "lol fully automated communism xd" memer likes to think of it.

Marx wanted to find out how this separation came to be and how it is reproduced:
(Grundrisse, chapter 9)
We see here that Marx doesn't just want to understand how production can be done humanly, but also to understand the inhuman form it takes in bourgeois society which the economists explain to be natural. His effort is to undo that work, to show it as an expression of that inhuman way of life. This is what allows us the possibility of seeing a way of life 'worthy and appropriate for our human nature'.

(Capital vol.1, pp. 91-92)
Marx was pointing at deeper contradictions (and this is and can only be described in the realm of metaphysics and ontology, you fucking robotbrain). Selling yourself, your labour, life-activity in exchange for money as if you were a thing is more to the essence of the matter. The result of treating humans as things i.e. the result of wage labour makes humans and our life-activity a mere means, and the expansion of capital an end in itself.

The terrible conditions for workers is not a mere consequence of some system which is also subject called 'capitalism' it is the expression of the alien relationships we have with ourselves and our life-activity. The problem thus isn't simply that worker's life-activity, the ability of social production, is controlled by Mr. Moneybags Capitalist. Marx showed that this human ability appears in the form of capital, it is the property of capital and is controlled by capital, an impersonal social power of which the capitalist is merely a personification.

Also, the /illiterate/-tier deduction capabilities don't help your cause in any way.

Please off yourself now ty.

Your wall of text basically describes why Marx's theory is also a theory of value not just price, but I would contend that an economic theory also has to be a theory of price in order to be empiricially validated otherwise its just philosophy. Marx just assumed labor = value and value -> price as all the classical political economists did which is fine because its an empirically valid thing. However in this age of marginalism and neoclassical economics the LTV is considered wrong and / or outdated which is where the empirical/econophysical school comes in, providing statistical evidence and econometrics proving the LTV is right.

Your argument is that classical marxism is somehow better, but I contend that Marx's theories, particularly the LTV is better defended on a modern statistical basis, rather than committing us forever to some quirky 19th century epistemology, however revolutionary it may have been at the time. The whole alienation thing is a young Marx thing, the mature Marx didn't focus on alienation but rather commodity fetish anyway. In any case I don't see how mathematical defenses of the LTV detract from any of the other social antagonism critiques in Marxist Philosophy, they actually just make our case stronger.

Well the basic idea is that value is something that prices statistically "cluster" around. Therefore price almost never equal to value, but rather is distributed within its range, read classical econophysics by cockshott if you want to know more about that

Surplus value is already contained within SNLT. The surplus comes from the fact that workers are not paid the value they produce, but rather the value of their labor-power.

What prior knowledge is needed for reading these books? Why not R instead of Python?

Not that person, but yeah, if they aren't pretending to really believe what they say, it is a lack of literacy in the broader sense. It is easy to figure out when somebody is doing an equivocation, and stringing equivocations together is 90 % of the content these folks are producing (the rest is banalities). I do expect an average 15yo to see through the bluff. I certainly was able to see equivocations before learning that word. You don't need any sort of special power for seeing these or higher education. I don't think it is a coincidence that people with schizophrenia are attracted to that philosophy, as they are vulnerable to magical thinking in general.

Do you mean something like affine logic? Do you really believe it is the continental philosophers who write about these things?

You are talking to somebody who can't into logic (and I don't mean logic conceived by evil scientists, but really just basic stuff normal people are equipped with) and argues in bad faith. It is easier to destroy than to build. And likewise, when confronted with a field of knowledge one doesn't know anything about, it is much easier to dismiss it as unimportant than actually working on understanding it. So, for them it is not about figuring out anything, it is all about dominating discourse. What makes you doubt that all they want is dominate is that they are so far from being there. But the reason is not lack of intent, the reason is that they are dumb as bricks.

this wall of text is very good btw.

is Prabhat Patnaik any good economist?

Does "cluster around" imply the average of a large number of goods' prices (taken over an extended time) would be about equal to the average of the labor-values for those goods? And if so wouldn't that imply average profits across a large industry would close to zero?

Do you think Marx's own idea of socially necessary labour time was meant to already include surplus labor (and if so can you point to some specific quote or chapter of Capital that I could look at), or is this a revision of the concept by later Marxists?

Don't make me laugh

>Heisenberg: I think that QM proves platonic idealism correct
If you can't see the problems with that, you either don't understand philosophy of science or Marxism. And yet it's spammed here all the time to hound those who think methodological rigor is actually important.

This looks like a shitty design-your-own-major though. Is the math supposed to be preparatory work to follow the books above, or for more advanced works/the primary literature (is there really any?), or is it just a collection of skills you think someone should have if venturing into this field themselves? I assumed there'd be more on/involving optimization theory, and your stochastic processes book doesn't cover brownian motion or stochastic integration while the only material on continuous-time phenomena is on markov processes. Is that fine, or different from what you're intending?

Not who you're talking to, but this interests me immensely. A question tho.

I'm a dumb gay babby and I honestly don't see what math, computer science theory and programming could have to do with leftist theory. Is the idea to bring more formal logic and less discourse? If so, wouldn't it be more productive to read old texts on rhetoric, logic etc.? I mean learning math and programming is nice for your logical skills, but seem like a rather oblique way of improving your formal logic thinking.

How can math and computer science be of any use to Leftist or Marxist theory?

Doesn't math teach that no formal theory can be complete or be capable of proving itself, and the CS counterpart to that is that no algorithmic model can accurately, with 100% certainty, predict the future without solving the halting problem which is impossible, meaning that any system that attempts to automate economic central planning is doomed to failure at some point in the future?

These theories are completely worthless and in opposition to implementing Marxism, and should be discarded.

There might be an interesting way. Like someone else pointed out previously:

But the halting problem means that computers can't predict the future, unless the model is 100% accurate, so they always fail in the end. The only way for the model to be 100% is to have an exact simulation of the entire Universe, down to the sub-atomic level. That's not possible.

So it's useless for market planning. It's why the markets are so screwed up in capitalism, the software just makes the problems even worse. It's just a bunch of numbers be trading back and forth on computers, completely disconnected from reality.

If I recall correctly, the Soviets under Brezhnev also tried it in the 70s, and it failed every time.

It's better if the planning is done by humans.

I assume you're referring to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which you're either misinterpreting or misstating.
mathworld.wolfram.com/GoedelsIncompletenessTheorem.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems
This is an error akin to interpreting Arrow's Impossibility Theorem to mean "communism is impossible."
Kek
This isn't popsci hour

Even if the incompleteness theorems did say that, and even if your "the halting problem means u cant no nuffin" made any kind of sense, that still wouldn't be grounds for arbitrarily rejecting mathematics as a whole. What the fuck?

Perhaps the mother of all non sequiturs
Your argument applies to literally every Turing machine. Having the planning done by humans instead of physical computers is not a workaround. Your own argument still applies, if it's actually correct. Which it's not.

Basic math reading list

You are just delusional. Check out the .pdf attached (particularly chapter 4, p.22), and then

What theories? The entire field of math?

That you can't rely on an inaccurate model always predicting the future correctly is so utterly banal that I wonder what kind of person you imagine that could get some knowledge out of reading your drivel and it has nothing to do with the halting problem.
What about humans that use paper and pencil? Is that okay for you? Can I use an abacus? What if I told you that there are tools out there more powerful than an abacus, may I use one of these? Pfft.

Badiou is a mathematician, but i get the idea that OP would still call him a continental handwaving bullshiter. would you, OP?

Can you give us some examples of the kind of arguments he makes, or positions he puts forward? For example, Cockshott and Cottrell argue that economic planning is a computationally tractable problem through the application of linear algebra techniques on sparse matrices.

What kind of insights does Badiou have for us?

(also if you're the dude who was massively anally pained by my asking for a summary of useful conclusions from his work in the Badiou thread then kekimus maximus)

Falsificationism is unfalisfiable

The unfalsifiability of falsificationism is unfalsifiable.

Ebin. Seriously though if it can't even meet it's own criteria for truth then why would it be an accurate measure of truth?

Others have rebutted this argument, but I'd just like to point out, you don't need to look far into the future here. The simulations the algorhitm run may be set to look a day in the future, or a week, or a month, or whatever – time spans minuscule as far as these things go. Gosplan itself planned a whole five years into the future, and frankly, did a quite good job even despite the eternal shortages and ineficciency, considering the Herculean task they had. For time scales like these, you don't need a 100% accurate model of the economy, let alone the damn universe.

Funnily enough I neither know nor care about that. I'm literally a research scientist and all this retarded wanking about falsifiability has never actually been relevant to my work.

Hell, I'm not even the poster you're originally interrogating . I just corrected the spelling of one work in their post for clarity because I'm an autist.

wait, so your theories produce no testable predictions?

This is some good memes right here. Is this from /sci/?
Kek

It's not that, it's just that we never think about it in wanky general philosophical terms. It's more like "From our modelling we expected luminosity to do this under increasing excitation intensity. It did something else instead. Maybe X is causing it? We could find out if we measured Z as a function of Y." It's not that we aren't doing 'the scientific method' or whatever, it's just that neither me nor anyone I've ever worked with has ever bothered to sit down and think in depth about the full implications of it or whatever. Maybe that makes us bad scientists? None of my peer reviewers have ever complained about a lack of full consideration placed on the implications of the unfalsifiability of Falsificationism though. It's only non-STEM arts student faggots who ever want to get in a fight about it.

Wait for it…
math.harvard.edu/~shlomo/docs/Advanced_Calculus.pdf

This generally seems to be left to literature reviews and eventual textbooks on the subject.
Fukui's original papers on molecular orbitals looked opportunistic and crackpot-y in their time, but they're now the basis of how we understand reactivity. Fleming wrote a book in the 70s examining how it could predict broad classes of reactivity in the literature, and now the concept is part of the standard undergrad orgo course.
Ac hoc hypotheses and speculation are simply part of how research is done, larger theories emerge to make sense of it all down the line in parallel with the weight of available evidence.

"Falsifiability" is a rational principle and not an empirically derived model of the world. Falsfiability does not apply to the concept of falsifiability.

is this supposed to be as funny as i think it is because i'm dying>>1599933

anyway, leftist redditor here

i'm already a programmer and i'm dropping my computer engineering studies to instead pursue CS, data science, or mathematical economics

how do i make sure i put my skills and education to good use for the cause

make teh meme viruses to corrupt the children pls :DDDDDDD

Commodity fetishism is an aspect of alienation - the fact that social relations between people become relations between things is a core part of Marx's theory of alienation. Never mind the fact that the continuity in Marx's thought is uncanny. There is a footnote in Capital Volume 1 where Marx reproaches Bentham for misunderstanding how to study human nature. This critique retains the ideas of "constant" and "relative" assertion of human nature.

Furthermore, Marx did not "just assume that labour = value which is turned into price". Marx goes to great lengths to emphasize the changes he makes to classical value theory. In particular, he critiques Ricardo for not understanding how the social ontology of Capitalism treats labour in Theories of Surplus Value. His choice to introduce the category of abstract labour was not some "accident" based on a haphazardly made (though empirically valid) set of assumptions popular to his time. It was introduced on purely logical grounds. You can not point to "abstract labour" just like you can't point to the universality of "social vs private labour". Marx's investigation into the value form is a description which doubles as a *critique* in the process.

What leftcom poster is trying to say as that by treating Marx's project as an empirical project rather than one of emancipation you misunderstand the core of Marx's thought and thus can not possibly remain faithful to his project. Marx is not trying to offer a positive doctrine of economics, the concreteness within Capital is utilized to the end that it can support the abstract notions Marx is putting forward. This is not to say that we should move away from "empirical work" - quite the contrary, I admire what Shaikh does. But - to designate Marxism as an "empirical" science is to scrub away the emancipatory and radical aspects of Capital. The goal is to understand how we produce the relationships that estrange us from our own being.

I haven't posted on leftypol in a long time and forgot how to use italics >:(

That would require that he prove that he does know what our own being is and how it >should< develop. Marx's anti-economy and anti-politics comes from a ground he himself does not justify on logical metaphysical grounds, but rather on dogmatic intuitions.

You should start by offing yourself, and halting the slow spread of cancer known as Reddit

>That would require that he prove that he does know what our own being is and how it >should< develop.
Wow I didn't think this was empty-critique day, I thought that was Wednesday.

Where is the proof for Marx's idea that human species being is labor? Oh, nowhere but an appeal to intuition and terrible anthropology.

Empirical proof? In what respect do you think labour is conceived?

Oh yes, the bourgeois too have empirical evidence. Because empiricism is totally what makes sense for metaphysics, totally.

It's hard to tell because you aren't critiquing any particular aspect of his formulation, how he stands opposed to say Rousseau or other enlightenment thinkers etc. What do you think Marx's starting point is?

On what grounds does Marx get to claim that labor is the species being? After all, other creatures labor to create things. It's not unique to humans to have a representation in mind and craft it in reality. It's a difference in quantity and not in quality. Why would labor be the species being any more than other things unique to us like culture or language?

Are birds capitalists for building nests and creating private property? Do beaver damns belong to all beavers?

See the cybernetics thread (in catalog, accessible if you go to the bottom of the page and go to the link for it). We can race each other to the finishing of the linearly-optimizing input-output calculator!

Also, don't mention that you're from Reddit around here. A while back, there was a mass exodus of redditors after r/soc's catgirl debacle. The resultant drop in posting quality for the next few months nearly killed the board for good, although the userbase has been permanently expanded by a not-insignificant amount.

Point went over your head, user. Maybe you should read the post again and at least answer my question with a relevant question.

Oh, so just to be clear: you aren't going to answer my questions?

So, do you or do you not know WHY labor is our species being, or do you just parrot humanist silliness?

Just answer the questions, the relevancy isn't relevant.

No, I'm asking you to formulate your understanding of Marx's starting point and how he develops his understanding of species being.

:^)

So you don't actually know. Got it.

No, I just would expect someone who says that Marx builds his theories on "dogmatic intuitions" to be able to back up this meaningless assertion with an understanding of Marx's theory.

Then show me where Marx gives a foundation for the claim that it is the species being other than a dogmatic claim or based on some other dogmatic claim like empiricism.

full brainwash

Also relevant
adequacy.org/stories/2001.10.14.163749.94.html

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He's saying it will require actual math and economics to plan the economy if socialism is ever to be implemented.

work on creating a computer program that decenterally co-ordinates noncompetitive economies

You heard it here first, folks. The existence of undecidable problems means we should chuck all of mathematics in the garbage. We primitivist now. Ooga booga, motherfucker.

No because the mean labor-value of money wages paid is less than the labor-value added by the worker.

OP of Soviet Cybernetics thread here. This thread is a flaming dumpster fire so far, but it's tangential to a necessary conversation to be had on dialectics and materialism.

Why did Marx use dialectics, a philosophical system of abstraction to track the development of ideas over time, to analyze a material world? Well, it goes back to Max Stirner (possibly Engels's alter ego), who, being the asshole character that he was, crashed the Hegelian idealist party by driving dialectics to their absurd limits and revealing how idealism ultimately negates itself in its conclusion, "I think, therefore I am" ultimately becoming "I think, therefore I am, therefore I am the only thing that can be because I can not very that others are in a way that is meaningful to me in the same way that my own being is to me".

However, understanding Max Stirner's philosophy to its fullest, one is forced to realize how ludicrous and pea-brained it is to apply it to the real world uncritically, for the real world is not made of idealist constraints - it is, in fact, devoid of them. Where do they come from in the first place, then? Well, the individual is constantly seeking to make itself (or what spooks it identifies with) free from material constraints, material constraints abstracted as ideas which eventually gain a life of their own as spooks. I would argue, in fact, that this post-Stirnerite observation is what underlies the whole of Marxism.
(cont)

Thus, Marx and Engels armed themselves with what philosophical models of world-abstracting they had at hand (first and foremost, the dialectic) and set out to analyze the mechanisms by which the material world created these abstractions which started out chained in usefulness as such and gradually came unbound as their usefulness passed, only to roam free and dominate the thought process. If the material system continued to drive forward and create new, as-ever-before unbearable circumstances, these conceptions of the world would fall apart and people would take what was theirs as the dialectical contradictions of the material world coming to a head led to the people internally facing the contradictions of their own thought-processes. This line of thinking is best seen in leftcoms.

However materialist this approach in overall content, its foundations were still fundamentally idealistic - they functioned along the lines of a set of triggering mechanisms of human thought which would come alive en masse once material conditions changed for all people and revolution thus became real. It did not turn out this way.

With the advent of cybernetics and its tacit verification in the digital age where groups maintain themselves spontaneously (while also feeding into positive feedback loops of antagonisms with a faceless "other") and capitalism interacts with states in predictable ways to self-sustain and many other such examples of the system naturally preserving itself instead of amplifying contradictions and self-destructing, perhaps it's time to abandon dialectics and reformulate our understanding of the mass psychology underlying all of our left-wing politics.

Kropotkin was closer to the mark because his anarcho-communism can be seen more as scientifically-informed engineering of the circumstances for a new society to form and survive - they started off from a material basis and stayed clear of metaphysics and the like. It's not good enough, though. While it was right to reject the failure of the totalizing encroachment of idealist implements upon the materialist analysis of Marxism, its lack of its own metaphysics has (and it pains me to say this) doomed it to never have a viable way of developing its own conditions-tailored praxis on its own in a way which situates particular circumstances in a larger context. For example, Anarchist Catalonia's model functioned well, but it lacked the context of everywhere else becoming anarcho-syndicalist at the same time. I still far favor it over the USSR, but as far as I know, they never noted of themselves that their project was doomed the same way Engels foresaw the conditions of the USSR's demise (isolation in a reactionary world where Western socialism has been put down) and which Lenin resigned himself to accept as defeat in the larger scope of things.

We must first develop out of idealism and its inherent contradictions and falsities as Stirner did, develop its useful abstractions of aggregates into an analysis of the material world as Marx did, abandon idealism-derived metaphysics entirely as they collapse in futility as Kropotkin did, and finally rebuild metaphysics starting from what patterns are observed in the real world in order to get a glimpse of the larger picture of human history's course and better direct prefigurative attempts to build a new world's seed in the shell of the old.

In other words, for the real movement to abolish the present state of things to be reborn, Marxism must first die and be reborn as something not-Marxist from empirical roots, growing as an addition to anarchist communism.

It's no accident that, over the past 70 years in the West, Marxism has become vulgarized, the domain of materialist-in-name-only idealist ivory tower sesquipedalians. It cannot stand up to how its idealism-derived metaphysics fail to match up with the development of the real world and therefore develops its analysis further and further than it was ever supposed to have to go, trying to find the one flaw keeping it from all meshing together and showing the way to the ideal praxis.

Cockshott and OP are wrong to reject all metaphysics by extension, but they're less wrong than all those of you defending classical Marxian metaphysics.

For a new metaphysics, the best places to start would be with American pragmatism, behavioral economics, and cybernetics from a social standpoint (cybernetics refers to the study of any system's control mechanisms, in the broad original sense of the word). Don't develop an entirely new metaphysics a priori with these, but perhaps use them to find out how we can develop new metaphysical models to connect changes in material relations with mass action. The relations are there, if history's any guide. I'm fairly certain they're not dialectical, though.

Oh, and fuck you

...

somebody screencap this shit

Not him, but our suspicions of idpol are very much justified by the entire history of the "New Left" and I hope you understand the problems with their moderation style.

attack idpol when it happens. at this point website cliques are becoming a form of idpol all its own.

I already snipped it into two photos, although I'm not sure how to recombine them. I tried using Paint, but failed. I might just publish it in a modified and extended form to Bunkermag.

The book on stochastic processes has a draft here services.math.duke.edu/~rtd/EOSP/EOSP_beta.pdf
which is what you will find if you google it. It's riddled with typographical errors, grab a copy on libgen instead.

...

What do you think of bookchin's DiaNat?

Because falsifiability is a property of empirical models you fuckwit
You're making a category error

If eggs are real how come the word "eggs" isn't made of eggs. That's a basic logical mistake you hypocrite. You should read some continental philosophers to become as wise as I am.

What are rational principles if not parts of a model for describing how humans can derive knowledge? Are you suggesting that acquisition and analysis of information is not something that warrants being modeled empirically?

can someone post some books I should read before I dive into this? I'm pretty much retarded regarding economics right now

Capital vol 1,2,3
David harvey's reading guide to vol 1,2

But how does that relate to actual market prices? was defending the idea that the labor theory of value can be made empirical by saying 'value is something that prices statistically "cluster" around'…I assumed "value" was referring to labor-value as measured in terms of worker salaries, now are you saying that workers are paid less than the "true" labor-value they contribute? That would be in line with the notion of surplus-value, but in that case how can the quote by be an empirical claim? What *empirically measurable* quantity X is being talked about when an empirical Marxist makes the claim that "prices statistically cluster around X"? For it to be empirical this has to be a testable (and potentially falsifiable) claim about a relationship between two measurable quantities, not just something that's just true by the definition of "value" you use.

sounds like you're a fully fledged marxist

Falsifiability is not well-defined for non-empirical models. A model is "falsifiable" through observation-derived evidence. You clearly need to be working within some paradigm which handles that for falsifiability to make sense.
Is the logic of "Galileo is a man, all men have dicks, therefore Galileo has a dick" falsifiable? See, doesn't make sense.
"acquisition and analysis of information" the phenomenon can be modeled and we see it happen in cognitive psychology etc. But in the sense of "comparison of contending rule sets for dealing with empirical data," no, that's not something to be "modeled" because it's not a phenomenon. Unless you want to talk about the actual act of deciding on one and the conditions which lead people to do so, especially as it pertains to mass scientific illiteracy. Then people are influenced by observable factors.

funny meme fam

Marxism's strength has always been a moral one, not a logical or economic one

t. never read Marx

t. has read Marx but doesn't understand Marx

Ok, tell me all about this "moral philosophy" of his

It definitely in Marx's own conception of the Law of Value. It can be readily found by reading the first few chapters of Capital Volume I.
From Chapter 1:

From Chapter 5:

One possible source of confusion might arise from the distinction between "surplus labour" and "necessary labour." By definition, surplus labour is not included in necessary labour, but "necessary labour" and "socially necessary labour time" do not refer to the same thing. It is unfortunate, but as Marx points out in footnote 5 of Chapter 9:

When one writes "SNLT", one is referring exclusively to the former definition.

[Note: in the above references, I am using the chapter numbers of the English edition of Capital.]

I think I'll start lobbying the moderation to make shit-talking outsiders that came in to argue in good faith a bannable offense.

Well you assumed wrong. This is in complete opposition to Marx's theory of value as socially necessary labor-time. Wages and salaries are, in his theory, simply the value of the commodity called "labor-power" and hence are in some sense independent of the value added by the worker.

I cannot speak about the exact quote since I am not that poster, but I'll just mention that, as above, labor-value is measured in units of time (e.g. hours), and thus ultimately has to be calculated by measuring the time it takes to produce (and reproduce) a commodity. Of course, there are other considerations (and differing perspectives on how exactly to do the calculations).

The assumption I was talking about to wasn't about what Marx meant by "value", it was about what meant by the term in "Well the basic idea is that value is something that prices statistically "cluster" around.' The reason I assumed that the comment was talking about something like "wages paid to workers" or "time spent working" was because this was supposed to an answer to my question about how the LTV could be made "empirical", turned into a testable claim about things we can actually measure.

Also, I just looked at the link in the OP, and one of the links on that page is to a paper at eprints.gla.ac.uk/47872/1/47872.pdf about "testing the labour theory of value"–it seems like they are just saying market price is proportional to hours spent working on a good, since they say on p. 4:

bump

agree, this topic needs more elaboration

rebump

rebump to that

rererebump

More sources of empirical marxism, pls ;__;

I'll start reading Anwar Shaikh.

this

Well? Is anyone going to make the case for dialectics continuing to be relevant when we have other philosophical tools at our disposal for analyzing society and its development?

Where are the leftcoms? You'd think that they'd vigorously attack this for all the glorification of Marxian theory that they do.

Instead, everyone's off eating bait en masse and sperging about e-celebs. Quality's really taken a dump in the past month.

Is my ranting pseudo-intellectual? Is it of any actual value?
Also, meant to write

Take a guess.

You could try doing your own stuff. Teach yourself mathematics and some programming languages to create programs to analyze large amounts of data to support or disprove hypotheses created before. I'm working on the calculator right now, but I'd greatly appreciate work in that vein for side reading later on.

my guess is u like it and ur a closet bookchinite

good

Full disclosure, I have only learned Single-Variable Calculus, Linear algebra and basic numerical analysis (plus some basic statistics), I don't know that much about stochastic processes, only that they are used in econophysical marxist theory. Also I only know linear optimization, AFAIK non-linear optimization is even less computational tractable than LA. The math is supposed to be a prereq to the economics texts, i dont think shaikhs work is as mathematical as cockshott's, but there's still some material that matrix/vector formalisms would help you understand

You should watch his graduate seminar/course on his book "Capitalism: Competition, Conflict and Crises". Youtube link: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQzsQMPHKEXFsc6KwjFP1M546nnSpduF5

And you wonder why STEM people don't get into leftism

I think its the other way around lefties get sucked into the social sciences, liberal arts, etc. At College because its more 'political' From there they get sucked into a black hole of intersectional / muh privilege theory, postcolonial theory, etc. and basically become SJWs. If I could give any advice to an aspiring young marxist today, it would be to major in Physics, Comp. Sci, Math, etc. Or at the very least stay away from majors like sociology, psychology, etc. where you will have hippie liberal idpol shit crammed down your throat. Study marx & other theoriests on your own imo, and knowing math shit will help you learn EMPIRICAL MARXISM

Ill check it out

no

people like to rant on leftypol, its a thing

I wonder when that guy is going to combine this thread and the cybernetics thread into a single post

Someone else is already combining the two with another thread to make a single OP for a new thread when they all die.

But any thoughts? I posted it so I could get replies.

like a screencap?

Or store it on a blog. Far too much discussion is being lost due to threads dying or dropping out of memory. How are we suppose to build a theory if we keep losing 90% of it?

Post Keynesians should be under here also. They synthesize parts of Marx while not being Marxists.

Steve Keen has youtube lectures that go over the basics.

I already have several archives of the cybernetics thread. There's an archive of the communization thread somewhere - it's a shame I don't have it, or I'd be reading it right now. It looks interesting, but I don't know much about it.
Could this potentially be a new feature for bunkermag? Something like a blog section where people run individual ones on larger topics, like a tab for communization blogs, a tab for cybernetics blogs, a tab for philosophy blogs, etc.
I'm also considering writing a book about my ideas once the calculator's done. If I don't finish it in the next few months, someone else will.

Anwar Shaikh's book includes MMT/postkeynesian monetary theory without Keens anti marxist nonsense

and if you dont enjoy physics/math/comp sci. you can get fucked stupid liberal sjw

No, but then at least do something practical like trade school, learn welding or machining or electrician shit.

Math can lie just as easily as words can.

Not at the level most people require. Math is more useful for spotting bullshit if you're an economist by trade, you don't need the maths to understand "Keynes says in a recession spend more"

Or maybe it's just my insecurity at totally flunking math in high-school because i got a bitch of a teacher while discovering that actually I'm at least an average tier writer when I put my mind to it because of the way my autistic mind processes text.

Introduce math and you'll just get neoclassicals, who drown things in STEM wank because they feel penis-envy towards physicists. Yes Mr. Friedman, it's a lovely model… for an economy containing one person and one consumer…
(In showing I don't actually regard Math with concept, I should emphasise the joy I felt at Steve Keen's mathematically-derived demonstrations of why neoclassical economics is fucking insanity. I'm not saying Math is worthless, just that pedestalling it isn't great. Truthfully my inclination is towards things that are either clearly stated verbally/textually, or - if handling something fuzzy - recognizing the fuzziness upfront and prodding the reader towards it at multiple angles.)

I dispute that. There are assumption and conclusions. The more mathy and formal writing is to ensure that the way the conclusions are reached is correct. Of course, precise reasoning can't be counted on to lead to a right destination if the assumptions one starts with are wrong, but imprecise reasoning allows to reach wrong conclusions from correct assumptions as well.

??? Where to start with that one. Neoclassicals claim that short-run production costs per unit increase when you produce more, which I believe usually doesn't happen unless production is extremely optimized for a particular quantity and then you make a snap decision to quickly start producing above that. Why should learning more math change my view on that?

The assumptions are very important. Since you retain autonomy over those, it's ultimately true that the lies are of equal ease - it's just how you justify them. That's the point about mathematics being able to lie as easy as words. (One could be pedantic and say that the assumptions are just big bad words corrupting the pure mathematics, but then I'd have to engage in some rocket science involving the Symbionese Liberation Army and the house of the objector.)

It shouldn't, but it should let you extrapolate the absurdity of their models on the basis of their own assumptions*. Or laugh as they reject basic concepts because reasons.

Linking that latter part to the initial part about getting neoclassicals doesn't sit well with me. The point with bringing up neoclassicals is that you'll essentially get a big pile of people who make shit assumptions and pretend mathematics justifies it, no better than anyone who hides behind a big pile of words. The point with Keen by comparison was to emphasise that I'm not "attacking" mathematics as a whole, just throwing mud at the STEMlord sort of idealisation.

*I mean, I'm partial to just going "Yeah but reality clearly doesn't align with that", but seeing "You're not even right on your own terms!" is nice.

But that's wrong. To argue for something wrong in a rigorous way looks like this:
very silly assumption -> airtight deductions -> very wrong shit
To arrive at the same end with fuzzy arguing doesn't require concentrated massive wrongness at the beginning, you can go like this:
slightly stylized assumption 1 -> almost airtight deduction number 1
slightly stylized assumption 2 -> almost airtight deduction number 2
slightly stylized assumption 3 -> almost airtight deduction number 3
deduction 1, 2, 3 taken together -> almost airtight deduction = very wrong shit

And when somebody complains to the fuzzy philosopher, there is this handy reply: You are splitting hairs. If I change this part, the result barely changes. Therefor, we might as well ignore this. So let's ignore this. If I change that part instead, the result barely changes, therefor let's ignore that and so on.

yeah well neoclassicals get away with assuming infinitesimals equal zero
so there

I know that they do that BS with making the demand curve flat. The sorts of arguments they are making are also present in less mathy texts. The mathy presentation makes it easier to see the BS.

yet they get away with it anyway, indeed they do so more effectively than any frenchman.
anyone capable of functioning in modern society can take a punt at disentangling word salad, to disentangle equations takes much greater effort, particularly when the insanity is often plain in the assumptions with little need to delve further. (As noted in Keen's book, half the reason economics students accept the assumption of a benevolent dictator ensuring optimum wealth distribution before transactions take place to prove free markets will yield optimum welfare is because they're too busy grappling with the mathematical problem they're being asked to solve than asking "hold on, isn't this scenario fucking stupid?")

If you don't know mathematics, "it's been proved with this mathematical model!*" is an amazing tool for lying.
*model rests on shaky assumptions and bad mathematics, fortunately most people can barely manage arithmetic so TINA.

I went into college a commie-stem but stayed away from muh humanities because I couldn't stand the non stop BS idpol. Everything was idpol first, substance last. And the moron lily white suburbanites ate it up, or at least sucked it up like a mayo-laden sandwich. The few token, myself (a mulatto) included, we looked at each other and snickered. The white teachers didn't dare stop us, either. And yes, I did little work and got straight As whenever idpol came up, because they dare not try to educate the legitimately woke!

Idpol is not even remotely consistent. It is literally upside down as it treats groups as more real than individuals and is thus the very embodiment of category error. And worse it engages in mirror image narcissism by way of overcompensatory self hatred, passive aggressively celebrating Eurocentrism et. al. while denying the much more complicated history it fails to uncover. Fuck, every Black person smart enough to get into a real college knows that European slave traders didn't have to catch their own slaves. Slavery was neither invented by nor perfected by nor worst under Europeans, either. Just more cultural appropriation! God I am angry today.

I suppose by the time Trump gets a second term, maybe then the master race will realize they've done nothing but enable sick fucks who just want to realize some revenge fantasy and never cared about liberating anything else but "muh dick." And therefore activated the almonds of the sleeping white giant by pushing to hard on demographic shifts. Look at Latin America, the European rulers only became more brutal as their demographic domination slipped away. The same phenomenon explains the hostility of Iraq's Baathist Sunni under Saddam to the much more numerous Shi'ites who are Iranians in everything but name. Fucking shortsighted people thinking they're woke. They're woke like Holla Forumsyps are red pilled. Same drug, different goals. Neither enables one to see the truth. It's the neverending story of idpol.

anyway,

Yes, with enough material resources (6-7 earths equivalent). We can keep people mollified enough they won't cannibalize each other. The scientists are right, you can't change human nature, not without ethically challenging genetic engineering programs that humanists would never go for. But we don't have seven earths. So cross as many appendages as you have, put your dick up your own ass, or whatever, and hope we pull off another tech miracle without simultaneously burning the fucking atmosphere off the planet. Otherwise, when the interregnum ends, we'll end capitalism but be back at feudalism. John Deere has already gone full Orwell, implying that corporate personhood makes corporations not only people but more equal than actual people.

The fix is in, it always has been. Aggressive narcissists will take as much as they can get away with and more while the rest of us are reduced to slaving away for the crumbs. The only respite has been those times of grand civilization where the right narcissist strove for for the right goals. Here's a real good one. After the 1877 Railroad RIots, The Pennsylvania Railroad, under upper management by engineer STEMlord introvert Thomas A. Scott, gave in to the demands of the strikers despite the egregious damage the latter had caused. In doing so, PRR became the effective standard bearer of both labor safety and railroad technology to the point that PRR standards largely became North American as well as very often world standards. The Westinghouse three-way break is still the standard braking technology nearly everywhere. Even uber-high tech TGV and Bullet train sets have this as the last line of defense should inductive braking and other fancy stuff suffer a failure or power loss.

Western capitalism was not one of those times. Middle class prosperity was a fluke. A few enlightened wild boars, pre-oligopolized industries and ultimately corrupt ethnically chauvinistic governments managed to force union reforms in the first act. In oh so genteel Europe, outright violence and the the threat of a full communist revolt supplied the elbow grease. Cold war hostilities pushed higher education in the second act. The third act is played out, and most people just aren't fit for STEM. The fourth act is now playing and will be the great hollowing out. If we survive to the fifth, we'll either have a functional welfare state, or laissez-faire feudalism.

.cont

For history to end, God must be constructed and must be a selfless computer! We wuz data, processes and sheit!

All models are wrong, haven't you heard?

So then, excuse an ignoramus here, but the idea is that all the endless theory that has been written by certain continental types (I can't stop thinking of the French) doesn't help with the one central aspect of all kinds of socialism or even anarchism: a planned, rational economy, whether centrally or distributed, and this would require a whole lot of hard science. Did I get the gist of it?

Okay, so I found pic related in the "Classical Econophysics" book mentioned, in this chapter, end of page 9: ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/ecn265/value.pdf

Can someone explain how the worker is able to perform 8 hours of labour if only provided sustenance with his wage equivalent to 5 hours?

A machine will not add more labour than it has been imbued with, so how come the worker is able to do this?

Sorry if it's an obvious question.

Because they only need 5 hours of wage-goods to live. For example an agricultural worker might produce enough daily food for 100 people per 10 hour work-day.

yes, thats basically it, except I would say its more math and programming than science per se

logic is philosophy which is what philosophers do

btw, he said "formal logic", which is not the same thing as logic.

Only a philosophical illiterate would have misunderstood what he meant

Isn't formal logic also part of philosophy? If you take a class on symbolic logic at a university, its going to be in the philosophy department

Again, arguing for free market nonsense does not in any way need math. Economics as an academic field used to be much less mathy a century ago, but guess what, ideologically it was the same shit even back then. I found it very easy to see the BS in neoclassical econ, I tried to figure out a time before the BS turn in economics, so I read older things. One or two decades turned out to not be enough (even though the 70s stuff was a bit more open-minded and diverse than 90s stuff), I went back further and further with no end in sight. I used to have a bit of hope that one could find something useful in very unmathy German economists from a hundred years ago who were doing something that was more like a mix of sociology, journalism, history, a tiny bit of stats. Instead I found statements like:
-prof dr dr dr phd Arschgesicht
with the credibility of statements established by peeps citing each other approvingly in a circlejerk that was worse than anything I have ever seen on subreddit. Don't blame math.

The precise language makes it easier for me to see what they are talking nonsense. If what you mean is that they got away with fooling people like you before reading Keen, ask yourself what sort of discourse milieu you are part of where every statement is drenched in sarcasm and you get endlessly mocked for ever admitting lack of knowledge in some arcane topic or not being able to instantly have 100 % perfect understanding of something, which is precisely why people get away with obfuscating BS, and whether you want to continue being a part of a milieu that is fundamentally reactionary in how it works, no matter what self-image it has.

There's been a great deal of confusion with regards to "empirical marxism", the empirical part is in reference to the emphasis those theorists (Shaikh, Yavkovenko, Cockshott) put on econometrics /empirical proof of the LTV. It is not meant to denote an epistemological position. Cockshott, for example seems to be sympathetic to Althusser:

dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/althusserreview.pdf

Shaikh, on the other hand, does seem to be a bit more of an analytical type

I don't blame math. I just don't blame language either. Obfuscation can take any means, down to scribbling in faint ink.
The point is that math isn't a panacea, that math is tainted by bullshitters too.
(I was never convinced by neoclassicals, It's just been a developing process to figure out why they're wrong, something I've found completely manageable with words alone. The problem, really, is people who don't have time or interest to read or to calculate, i.e. the "average person" )

I would argue that the general math-elitism (and conversely, math/physics-envy, which is partially why mainstream economics is now in the state it's in.) is part of the reason for the present state of discourse. It's certainly the reason I made my original point, to sling mud at a field that likes to imagine itself pure.

Take this:
1. Producing on a bigger scale usually means same or lower costs per unit.
2. Higher cost per unit can happen when doing an unexpected ad-hoc increase going above what the production line was optimized for.
3. When the production line is made for a range in output quantity and you have a buffer, changing the amount within that range tends to keep the variable costs per unit about the same.
4. If your income doubles, you don't buy the same stuff as now twice, your consumption changes, so if the income distribution changes, productivity measures based on what you can sell in what number for how much also change. What is considered an uneconomic/inefficient/irrational activity changes.
5. Neoclassical assumption is that costs per unit usually go up when production is increased, which leads to the conclusion that prices (including the price of wages) are technically-physically determined and that monopolies are unlikely to form, after all increasing production gets harder and harder :o)
6. Neoclassical assumption is also that people have perfect knowledge of the future, which is at odds with the situation described in point 2, where you actually do have rising costs per unit. Aside from lack of realism, this assumption is paradoxical: Try to imagine people with perfect knowledge of the future playing rock-paper-scissors.

In conclusion, neoclassical economics is unrealistic and incoherent.

You can explain that in half an hour or less to a normal person.

Good thread but can you help a humanities boy like me understand it?

econophysics is pretty meme-y from what I've read.

Few of these books are even left wing, especially the linear algebra and programming ones LOL

...

Read "Arguments for Socialism" by Zacariah and Cockshott, its a good intro to the school of thought:

dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/ArgumentsforSocialism/argumentsasreleased.pdf

Wow, you're awfully smug. BTW you need linear algebra to learn any modern Marxist economic theory after the 1920s, even shaikhs works use matrix/vector formalism. This is what is meant about being proud to be illiterate, no one would ever say, yeah those books on rhetoric or writing aren't even left wing, guess its good to keep not understanding this chickenscratch which is irrelevant to the revolution

This, amirite?

They're necessary to understand many of the more complicated parts of economics and how it functions as a massive, interconnected system.
It's ridiculous to try to change such a massive system without empirically understanding its functional basis.
You're not very bright, are you?

They're not, but they're very useful.

Porky Gilbert Strang? :P

A liberal jewish non-finitist real analyst professor and set theorist was teaching a class on Georg Cantor, known mythmatician.

”Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship the Axiom of Infinity and accept that it is the most sophisticated mathematical statement the world has ever known, even greater than the irrationality of sqrt 2!”

At this moment, a brave, clever, hyper-constructivist alternative mathematics champion who had written 1500 proofs of the nonexistence of the reals and understood why Dedekind cuts were nonsensical and fully opposed the 13 fallacies of modern mathematics stood up and held up a piece of paper with point nine repeating written on it.

”What's the value of this limit, retard?”

The arrogant professor smirked quite Jewishly and smugly replied “one, you stupid finist”

”Wrong. Your definition says we need to pick a delta for every epsilon. If we tried to do that and the reals, as you say, were real… then it would take an infinite amount of time. Chuckle.”

The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of Principles of Mathematical Analysis. He stormed out of the room muttering those moronic "logical justifications". The same justifications academic morons use to "prove" the existence of "derivatives" (which are so impossible to reify that the most brilliant mathematician since Archimedes can't understand them) when they sadistically put the burden of proof on skeptics questioning the entire validity of modern mathematics. There is no doubt that at this point our professor, Gilbert Strang, wished he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and become more than a sophist academic moron. He wished so much that he had a cell phone to email in his resignation from embarrassment, but he himself had banned them from the classroom!

The students applauded and all quit their math majors that day and accepted Wildberger as their lord and savior. An eagle named “the first ever completely rigorous virus-free formulation of calculus” flew into the room and perched atop the American Flag and shed a tear on the chalk. The complete works of John Gabriel were read several times, and Archimedes himself showed up and railed against the nonsense of finding answers by taking the limit of ever more accurate finite approximations.

The professor lost his tenure and was fired the next day. He died of shame after being shunned by the whole mathematical community and the grave maker put the wrong spiral on his tombstone.

Chuckle.

What does computer have to do with marxism?

Use of stochastic models and other borrowings from physics and data science to prove or disprove its hypotheses.

Did you read any of the books in OP? particularly the book 'towards a new socialism' by wp cockshott, you can find it free pdf online

...

Of course I've read it, I started the Soviet Cybernetics thread! His essay "Calculation In Natura: From Neurath To Kantorovich" is far superior, though.
That is one well-made meme though, I I'll give it that.

Don't forget Cottrell!

On an unrelated note, I made a flag for cybernetic syndicalism (cybersyndicalism?). I'm terrible with MSPaint and would greatly appreciate it if someone could touch it up. In particular, I can't make the 12 gear teeth consistently, despite my best efforts.

Holy shit that flag is autistic. And "cybernetic syndicalism"? What is it with anarchism and making up 50 million different special snowflake tendencies without meaningful distinctions?
Cybernetics in this context is just a way of managing complex systems, it can be used even in the context of capitalist firms. You wouldn't start referring to such firms as "cybernetic capitalism" would you?

A) most people in the US don't know what either word means and are scared off if you tell them that you're an anarchist or a communist, giving you the "muh gorillions" and "muh freedumbz" spiels. Truth to be told, I'm just an ancom at heart with a different take on metaphyiscs and technology, and most of those special snowflakes appeared after "ancaps" became a thing and have nothing to do with actual anarchists. IIRC, Goldman never called herself an anarcha-feminist. Anarcho-transhumanism is obviously just a shitty meme, like anarcho-monarchism and anarcho-nationalism.
B) The point of it is that the entire economy is consciously structured in such a way as to operate in a manner able to be democratically fine-tuned through syndicates modifying a master program's objective function and otherwise self-managing through a closed feedback loop. Moreover, it aims to establish this through the use of the program within workers' cooperatives backing unions which they finance in order to spread the system. In other words, it bases its praxis around a control system realized in its starting institutions and grown from there.
pls no bully, I'm just trying make something appealing

Also, it was intended as a play on the words of "cybersyn", Chile's similar project.

Fair enough, though I disagree with relabeling what is essentially communism, as I don't believe you can fool people like that in the long term. People may be fooled at first but they figure it out pretty quickly once you start talking about abolishing private property and planning production. At which point the "muh gorillions" and "freedums" shit starts with renewed vigour.
Ultimately it's not simply the negative connotations of the word communism that people are getting upset about, but communism itself. It's not simply a matter of misconceptions, people are infected with bourgeois ideology and I don't see this changing until a severe enough crisis (or simply falling living standards) pulls the wool from their eyes.

(I also doubt co-ops can be used for revolutionary purposes but that's another matter entirely.)

How did Popper derive it, then? Using scientific analysis or just by doing what he accused the Marxists of doing: creating an abstract model and hoping it worked?

At least you aren't one of those Java or Ruby fags

You're not going to believe this, but most people in the US are very open to communism under different names. Cooperatives are actually taking off (not socialism, I know, but a huge step towards it for Americans) since 2008. Mutual aid is back under the name of "self help". No one likes corporations anymore, but those who support them (Tea Party) are in a haze of ideology and being scared of words with wrong meanings. They're actually the ones most open to communism. Just call it the extreme opposite (libertarianism, or paint cybersyndicalism as a right-wing ideology because it supports "small government") and they'll catch on. Paint it as a new idea without all the violent revolutionary rhetoric (at first?) and in different clothing, and they'll never guess what it really is. They'll go to their post-revolutionary deathbeds hating those "damn commies" and "big gummint", never realizing that they achieved communism.
We're closer to a revolution here in the US than anybody cares to say out loud or realize. Whether it will be a social one or not, however, is up to us.
I used to be skeptical on the grounds that, while they build the new world in the shell of the old, they don't breed class consciousness. I thought of a solution: unionize them all within a face-to-face democratic union! Not only does it provide a financial basis for the union to call strikes, create new cooperatives, and even seize workplaces if they go bankrupt or the owner abandons them, but it also keeps the workers in the cooperative class conscious and united.
In short, Porky's best weapons against unions become useless.

What's wrong with Java? I'm using it for the in-kind calculator, although that's mostly because Druid works as a data store for it and it's programmed in Java.

Guys I just wanted to say thanks for the nice thread.

It appears you think that Marx's dialectical method is something similar to Engel's conception of dialectics.
I recommend reading through the following link as an introduction to Marx’s conception of dialectics:
edensauvage.wordpress.com/2016/12/09/marxs-dialectical-method/

Thanks. This will take a while. Let me see if I can understand what Sauvage is trying to say.
Do leftcoms, like anarchists, see coops as a potential basis for a new mode of production, but differ on their usefulness because they cannot grow in a way which actually challenges capitalist hegemony? Is that what he's trying to say?
I won't deny that I've traditionally approached things in a very empirical manner (although I'm mostly a pragmatist, not a positivist) and that this might be why I've misread Marx, according to Sauvage.
Like I said, this makes a lot of sense for an idea, as there are always two poles: the abstract, idealist definition of the idea and how it actually works when applied to the material world. There will always be contradictions because the human mind cannot capture the enormity of the world and its interrelations with abstract reasoning without guides such as mathematics (maybe I should read Badiou). Maybe an AI will be able to in the future, but I doubt humans ever will. There are two solutions to end this cycle: follow analytical philosophy's codification of the world as abstract symbols and effectively act, between the dialogues of philosophers, as an emergent conscious collective AI, or follow Marx and Kropotkin by looking to the material world. Here we find dialectics unsuitable because the world is extremely multi-polar, and I doubt that there is a single duo-polar engine such as the wage labor-capital relation.

Moreover, the concept of wholes containing within them a unity of mutually interpenetrating opposites is Hegel analyzing the dominant positivist way of taking on the world around him, itself intended as a way to codify analysis of the world so as to negate the negation of earlier theological thinking. Hegel's work is, after all, a dialectical response to the works of Kant.
(cont)

But you never defined quite what criticism actually is in the material realm of things. Is it action against capitalism informed by a negative-scientific understanding of its contradictions, thus making armchair theorizing the ultimate anti-Marxist thing to do if dialectics truly apply to a purely materialist analysis?
So I wasn't entirely wrong when I stated that Marx had failed to pull away entirely from idealism. He attempts to decisively bridge the gap between the material and the ideal, connecting the poles of his ideas to poles of material contradictions seen in society and thus turning the liberal "is-ought" fallacy on its head into the "ought-becomes-is" which characterizes Marxism. This, however, is very fragile, as it depends upon there being a dialectical nature to the social relationships of men. When this falls apart under the cybernetic understanding of capitalism (and class society in general) as many self-regulating systems within what Marx would call the "base" which continually interact antagonistically with one another in competition for institutional hegemony and therefore adapt simultaneously in holding with material change. My argument can be summed up as "what is, measured in terms of its practical effects, must determine the scope and mode of thought in how we determine our ought, to become the a new is via criticism in action of what already is". As Hegel's dialectics are crafted to break down Kant's approach to reality and make something better out of them, my approach to capitalism is crafted to break it down into its constituent pieces and reassemble it into what meets an ideal derived from real experiences, just as Proudhon's mutualism arose from his recording of the demands of the Lyon artisans and workers. In other words, what are called for by the contemporary struggle against capitalism are empirically-derived metaphysics, organically arising from an understanding of modern capitalism as a multi-tier acephalous cybernetic system composed of multiple cybernetic subsystems. In fact, I will call it "cybernetic organicism", the study and practice of critiquing modern society through a metaphysics derived from an understanding of its components as a never-idled set of practical relations, interlocking on multiple levels. Currently, its praxis can be described as cybersyndicalism, described in an above post. Feel free to now call me an inoperable brainlet, as I've probably misunderstood the whole thing. Yes, I'm very mechanistic and slightly autistic.

I suppose Marx was, in fact, not terribly influenced by Stirner, as his ideas are the direct result of criticism of Feuerbach clearly. Perhaps they existed alongside one another and Stirner's critique made tangential influences upon Marx's, but one does not precede the other. I'm glad that was cleared up.

If I'm understanding the word salad that is the article correctly, I don't think I ever misunderstood Marx's dialectics in an Orthodox-Marxist fashion, though.

Also agree, ruby is shit and the rails hype train died in 2013 so there's really no reason to use it any more. However, Java is actually a decent language.

My modified version of the flag, CyberLeninism version

I'm super late to the thread but I'm reading Cockshott rn and I want to know if he addresses the Achilles heel of pretty much all command economies: what happens when you have to interact with economies in which production is not maintained and mediated by the state for goods that are not available within the state? For instance (flag related) China under Mao sold grain on international markets for goods they did not have, and, due to the low prices of grain on intl markets, they had to take large amounts from the people, which exacerbated pre-existing issues with the food supply.

I don't think he ever does, so I'll speculate: The cybernetically elaborated plan would account for the required amount of the external products, while also selling some surplus of internal product in exchange for foreign currency.

Yep, Chapter 10 of Towards a New Socialism deals with trade between socialist and non-socialist states. They advocate for balanced foreign trade (ie, no loans and a balance between import and export value). Interestingly, they also advocate for a reverse of the Soviet currency system: labour vouchers would be allowed to circulate freely in the capitalist markets and can be used to pay for exports from the socialist state, but inside the socialist state the currency is non-circulating (ie, is destroyed upon redemption). The reasoning is that it does no harm to let the labour-backed socialist currency circulate on the world market, but internal circulation would turn labour vouchers into money capital.

ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/
Chapter 10.

No wonder it's shit.

Agreed - the writing is very poor. I was hesitant to say it at first because Sauvage might have other good articles, but he comes across as being very condescending over stuff that isn't even that hard to understand. "Integument", repeatedly? Luckily, I know my biology. Just say skin, you verbose twat.

Autism: Stalinist Edition

fuck you bro, that flag rocks

some more flags

The lambda is a symbol of lambda calculus, a theoretical model of computing is associated with functional programming

why would syndicates give a fuck about this objective function?
if they operate in a capitalist framework, profit is all they need to care about, not some optimized plan indicators

its like labor exchanges all over again
they too were supposed to facilitated a separate system of exchange based on the labor time between producers that would eventually take over capitalism

but in reality, because producers that engaged in labor exchange couldn't satisfy all the demand for various goods, labor exchange was forced to trade on the capitalist market essentially undermining its own purpose, as prices in labor vouchers became just a reflection of capitalist market prices

Yes, that's why we need to abolish exchange value altogether and organise production on an entirely in-kind basis

The funniest part is that those books are prolly all real. Homology is a real discipline within mathematics.

Naive Lie Theory (pronounced Lee):
springer.com/us/book/9780387782140

Who the fuck said anything about maintaining capitalism? Where are you pulling out this dumb meme of "ansyns want to maintain capitalism"? This isn't the first time I've seen this. Ansyn is ancom with different praxis.

There are no syndicates under capitalism, as they are an idealized form of democratic union structures being extended to fulfill the roles currently played by corporations and a lot of those of the state. Under capitalism, it's entirely possible for the calculator to be given an objective function of maximizing profit and still be more efficient than conventional capitalist firms.
Except for that there is no exchange in this system. It's a microcosm of actual planning within the capitalist mode of production, one which will easily supersede it through far superior efficiency. The unions aren't donated to or exchanged with - the cooperatives are closed shops where people pay a certain percent of what they make into the union, thus creating the lamentably necessary institution of surplus extraction to fund any of this.
I haven't read anything on it yet (and still would like to find the archived thread for it!), but it seems superficially similar to communization.

I like the second one! I'm starting to think that this flag was a mistake, though.

Chicago school "autism" aside, science is only subordinate to logic/maths to the same point that philosophy is subordinate to language. It's a thinking aid and means of communicating thought. Going without means relying upon intuition, which is too often wrong. Here are some stem-fags going on about math-lite sci-eng,

physicsforums.com/threads/the-pitfalls-of-self-taught-science-and-engineering.75737/

Can someone please make a PNG of this? Inkscape is hard to learn.

i think its already a png

You know what I mean; it's unfortunate that it's a bitmap.

tfw too dumb for this thread

You're just a lazy shit looking for excuses not to read.

I don't see whats wrong with this. Your not going to be competent in science/engineering without it. You need calculus if you want know classical mechanics, you will need linear algebra for Quantum mechanics,you will need differential geometry if you want to learn general relativity and so on. Sure intuition is good but without math your basically just an ideas guy.

...

You can read the first book ' arguments for socialism' its a free pdf online. Not too much math AFAIK and outlines the political beliefs of cockshott etc pretty well

your syndicates-coops or whatever, as I understand will be still operating in a capitalist economy

kek, under what rock have you been living?
corporations already use linear programming techniques for profit maximization
Kantorovich was given Nobel Prize for a reason
profit is perfect as a criteria of optimality for the general function optimization
that's why so many soviet planning theorists used general function that maximized profit as a general welfare function in their models of optimal planning
it's an easy way out
ideal single criteria of optimality

to think you can beat corporations in their own game on their own field is nonsense
all else equal, coop cannot beat traditional capitalist enterprise
to beat it coop needs to have a higher rate of exploitation which is not possible

there will be, because your system of syndicates cannot possibly produce all the required inputs
so it will trade for those inputs on the capitalist market

again, corporations already use optimization techniques for profit maximization

no way these coops can amass the necessary volume of investment to compete with traditional capitalist firms

...

[Katyusha intensifies]

There is literally nothing wrong with central planning

w e w l a d

Therefore we don't do that. It's syndicalist for a reason - syndicalism grows out of trade unions and a praxis centered around them. We run strikes against them, propagandize the workers. This creates a continual influx of labor (as this model can work well with mass amounts of cheap labor) as they're fired for demanding decent conditions, reduces efficiency in capitalist firms as they either let skilled workers go or have to raise wages, and sets the stage for mass democracy and the creation of large solidarity networks among the reserve army of labor to back up traditional syndicalist tactics.

Also, cooperatives have higher productivity than capitalist firms, consistently so. Imagine how much higher we could bring that if we had a technically literate left which could bring to them the same labor-saving technologies as what capitalist firms have.

You mean Soviet-style central planning? It was a disaster without a strong monarch like Stalin. That's beside the point, though. Why would anyone care when you can write "distributed_planning();" to a program and get a perfect result every time?
/r/equesting a Cockshott version of the Pacha meme, make it say "when the in-kind optimization is just right"

We run strikes against corporations*

Profit-oriented syndicates is not what the person you talk with has in mind, but anyway: Imagine a world where most people work in profit-oriented co-ops and there is a stronk center that controls some really fundamental resources like electricity. The center can still plan a lot of things and induce the firms to follow the plan by pricing things in a way that makes following the plan attractive. The same resource can have a different price for different firms. Now, what does making them follow the plan mean? It doesn't just mean that the center has a model of each firm and what that firm wants and then prices the resources in a certain way to motivate the people there, hoping the model of the firm' behavior is at least roughly accurate (and the firm then might take a huge chunk of the subsidized stuff for re-selling or bartering), the subsidized resources come with requests for quantities of particular things the firm produces.

Now you might wonder: Doesn't the poor center run out of wealth, with all these subsidies? Recall that if the center is the monopolist of fundamental resources, they can also make you pay more, they can crush your balls if they want. Plenty of people don't like their balls being crushed, so the question becomes rather: How do we limit the power of the center? There could be a regular direct vote on some fundamental thresholds, like how high can the center make the fuckyouwedontwantyourcompanytobuythatrightnow price of a resource they sell relative to what the average of the price they offer for the same resource to other companies is at the same time.

Profit is a micro-economic monetary concept. What we want is use-values. This is rather complicated, because we are talking about a heterogeneous pile of different things. On the small scale, there is no conundrum: A boss expands what he can consume when his profit jumps up. The heterogeneous pile of available consumer-item combinations after the profit jump is unambiguously better for him because it contains the pre-jump old pile. Whether an item he consumes he produced himself or got in exchange, what does it matter. Humanity as a whole can't buy shit from anybody, we only obtain the stuff by production and extraction from nature. And consciously planning this STUFF we want is tough stuff, because it is hard to compare scenarios with different piles and determine which pile is better for us, aside from discarding piles that are strict subsets of other piles.

I dunno if this is supposed to be hyperbolic because technologically speaking this is already pretty feasible.

Feasible but not implemented. That's what we're arguing for - implementation of what is by your own admission a feasible idea.

I want to try this, if only to bathe in lolbert economic tears.

Come along to the /leftytech/ thread if you want to help us out.

Why do analytic philosophers hate dialectics?

Everything is part of philosophy.

Is steve keen anti-marxist? I'm not sure that's true.

...

he is, in debunking economics he argues against marxist economics

>nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/how-the-computer-got-its-revenge-on-the-soviet-union
Beautiful article. All tankies should read it and face the flaws of their system

Yea, well there are also different branches ("types") of mathematics, each with their own purposes. Boolean logic is good for low-level programming in assembly for example, but fuzzy logic might be better for machine-learning or what-else. Science isn't about "universal truths", it's about approximating reality in each, different context.

MIRI is trying to do that, or more like, they're studying how an AI should be build so as it won't be either hostile or neutral(which is pretty much the same) to humans and the rest of the world. They publish their research and accept donations on intelligence.org/

and how are your syndicates going to absorb this surplus labor?
people need to have a source of income
and to pay people your syndicates need to produce something for exchange
therefore your syndicates will be in competition for market share with traditional capitalist firms

source?
productivity is a function of the level of technical equipment
and the level of technical equipment is a function of capital investments
and as I already said, traditional capitalist firm can accumulate far greater amount of savings for capital investment

you can have in mind whatever you want
but syndicates will be forced to seek profit if they want extended reproduction

you just described the Soviet Union, only in SU it were state enterprises and center could set prices not only on natural resources and electrical energy, but also on the means of production, price of the labor power and the final product of the enterprise
planned reduction of the wholesale prices was the cornerstone of Stalinist economics
it forced enterprises to reduce costs by better utilizing machinery and improving production process so as not to be at a loss because enterprises could not reduce their costs by reducing wages

this means that the center needs to set differentiated prices for inputs and outputs, so that the enterprise is most profitable to produce the product required by the plan
The Kantorovich's theory of optimal planning was about this by the way
his objectively determined evaluations were these differentiated prices
and in Kantorovich's theory, center cannot force enterprises to follow a plan by just setting prices for one input

by doing so center is gonna increase costs of production for syndicates
what about all this talk of how syndicates are far more efficient than capitalist firms?
also as a result syndicates will have less funds for capital investment because of this monopoly rent

not in a socialist economy
the highest economic profitability of the whole socialist economy is a valid concept
profit arises as a result of costs accounting

In Capitalism Shaikh argues against Marx and Keynes.
Is Marx supposed to be beyond criticism?

Who are you even arguing with? Can you point to any post claiming such a thing?

Dear person who doesn't know what the enter key is for: The center doesn't just make stuff more expensive. It makes some stuff cheaper and some more expensive.

You seem to have no idea what profitability means in the context of what Kantorovich proposed. What "profit" is for the firm is shaped by the plan. It means following the plan. If the plan is dumb, high profit in following the plan isn't much to be proud about.

Point 3 is where you're wrong. Read about communization. While there will be exchange between the united whole of all the firms, internal relations would be planned and communistic. This is the true innovation of using the calculator - not the optimization of one firm's output as it is under a market economy, but the simultaneous coordination of all production according to human needs and internalized where possible.

Furthermore, syndicates are what come after capitalism; they refer to the democratic, council-like system of confederating firms, not unlike the factory committees which autonomously federated in revolutionary Russia until Lenin shut them down. Not the same thing as cooperatives. Those are merely a way to fund the decentralized, democratic unions and solidarity networks which are the real centerpiece of the praxis (hence the name "syndicalist"), being a method of deriving organic organizational forms while maintaining confederation, spreading itself as capitalism continually eats itself (any firm shutting down or losing profitability is an opportunity), and maintaining an ideological atmosphere so that the cooperatives do not degenerate into a vulgar self-managed capitalism and die out. In a sense, they're more akin to formalized mutual aid societies, being less formalized and more fluid than traditional cooperatives while still maintaining broad aspects of them.
thenation.com/article/worker-cooperatives-are-more-productive-than-normal-companies/
source? There's no actual evidence for this conventional theory of "why cooperatives are rare", shared both by neoclassical and Austrian apologetics of capitalism and faux-Marxist opportunists who hasten to dismiss the possibility of workers' self-management and self-activity. Both are enemies of what Marx and Proudhon both advocated for.
community-wealth.org/sites/clone.community-wealth.org/files/downloads/article-olsen.pdf
It's hard for cooperatives to get off the ground because they, by definition, cannot take investment from the likes of venture capitalists and remain cooperatives.

Shaikh argues against the prices of production theory marx gives in vol. 3 but that is a defense of the LTV because it is in favor of a 'naive' theory of the LTV, that being capital vol 1 No Marx was not 100% correct, but steve keens critique of the LTV is basically Ian Steedmans neosraffian critique uncritically regurgitated from the 1970s. Shaikh incorporates MMT/Keynesian insights about money without using keens anti LTV bullshit

...

whats cycling

Example Rojava thread, no sage limits but older posts gets deleted when when post limit is reached. I can see the interest for actualitu related topic but i don't think it's that good for theory threads

Mods, please don't do this! Bump limit is 450 IIRC. We're still a good way off.

To get a request to mods through your best bet is reporting your post with the request explaining why in the report reason.

ITT

Delete this

Any time you are setting up a hypothesis (or hypotheses) to be refuted – rather than confirming – you are doing falsifiability. The other user that responded to you is right. It's testability under another name. The underlying philosophical assumptions are buried in your everyday practice. Philosophers like Feyerabend are right: most practicing scientists today are philosophical barbarians. Not that political practitioners are any better, since not a thread goes by here without some moron with no knowledge of the criticisms of metaphysical nominalism calling something a "spook" non-ironically while engaging in conceptual or platonic behavior themselves.

Firstly, it's a normative epistemic claim, you moron. You would know this if you had an ounce of philosophical background. It's suggesting what one should do. Secondly, go read psychologists of reasoning like Jonathan Baron. It's already settled empirically that falsifiability is a good way to go about things (among many other aspects). The underlying skill of falsifiability is tied to improving a series of cognitive biases ("how do I go about refuting this?") and being useful under statistical testing.

saged, cause you are retarded.

bump

Dude, don't act like a child calling other user retarded and 'saging', we are not in 4chan Holla Forums.

I'm becoming a marxist-leninist-cockshottist

What does Cockshott think about Cybersyn? And what do you guys think about it?

if i ever finish capital

bump

glad all the meme-ing is getting to you
READ COCKSHOTT

make it a meme

He reviews it in towards a new socialism

DO IT!

Dew it.

I think its a very interesting example of how a third world country managed to do something more advanced than either the US or the USSR.

youtube.com/watch?v=fSmQCvfT4pU

We're talking about a 1970s third world nation with only like 10 (outdated) computers in the whole country and no network to speak of, implementing a version of cybernetic planned economics that was somewhat successful before the coup.

I believe Beer's Viable System Model still deserves to be looked at today as a potential model for cybernetic planning

youtube.com/watch?v=9qKoaQo9GTw