/econ/

You do not need to study economics academically. Many economists haven't. Bataille himself wrote about political economy without being a graduated economist.

ELI5 the "falling rate of profit". What is it? Why does it happen?

I watched this video but I don't fully understand it:
youtube.com/watch?v=-e8rt8RGjCM

I understand that overtime workers get replaced with machinery (C) thereby increasing the C to V ratio (C goes up and V goes down)
And this also increases the surplus value for the capitalist (S) because V is being replaced with C and thereby going down (S goes up and V goes down).

But why does S/V increase at a LOWER SPEED than C/V? He never says why. Also why does he divide the whole equation by V? He doesn't explain that step. Also I'm still not sure I even know what "rate of profit" means exactly.

What did he mean by this? Labour time is still immensely important for a planned economy because it is directly the cost against which to measure use value.

Just read the big popular classic and splash-making econ books. Normal economics you learn in college is a bunch of neoliberal pseudoscientific mathematical wankery.

What happens when the rate of profit reach unsutainable levels?

Wait, hold on, I just rewatched the last part of the video where he says you get out of the problem when V goes down. I thought it was already going down.

I need an adult to explain this.

Oooooooooh wait, when he says that V gets reduced he just means that C is getting pushed more out of the system, not that it's going down relative to S.

I can't wait to have a definition of "common interest", an explanation of what makes it "common" and why it needs to be "reconcile" with self-interests, and a demonstration of how it can be achieved through markets.
Just a thought though: maybe the author of this "objection" arbitrarily decided to rebrand the interest of the dominant class (profit!) into "common interest" and… Voilà !
Yeah because the rest of the world knows no pollution… I'm trying very hard not to laugh right now.
(Btw the USSR was capitalist)
Like the bourgeoisie? Oh, and the sentence should be in the other way: it's only when you manage to live at the expense of other people that you don't have to work for a living.
I guess starvation and misery by lack of money isn't a real punishment then.
Oh, and the product of one's work is an excellent reward for said work. When I do my dishes I don't want money; I want clean dishes so I can eat in it.

Because…?
Because…?
A good thing the communist revolution will abolish all form of property then.
That's precisely what made them capitalist.
It wasn't that much, really.
Except for planning.
"The regulators" are the individuals themselves. So do they know better or not?

I should really get to reading das kapital

I think that's how you get a crisis, and then the "downward pressure" on wages, i.e. more people willing to work for less, means more S for less V return in return, which recovers the rate of profit (for a time).

What happens when you can't go lower?

You dig deeper.

Put everyone in prisons and make them work for free.

Where does Marx talk again about skilled labor in Capital? He explicitly says that the work will for the sake of simplicity deal with unskilled labor, while mentioning that skilled labor is equal to a certain quantity of unskilled labor.

Concrete labour time yes, to make concrete decisions.
For example: I make chairs, and 20 people have passed an order, but I take 2 days to make one so that makes only 15 in a month. So I'll need to ask my local council who should have their chair this month, and who can wait.

So knowing concrete labour time is important for planning, but it is not compared with other generic, socially necessary abstract labour time of every other product anymore (for we don't trade these products for one another).

No. Even today we don't do that, it's always socially necessary labour time against socially necessary labour time. You can't compare different types of quantities.

War (it destroys capital) or revolution.

Thats an interesting way of putting it, and youre right.

You can if you use labour vouchers and let the prices in labour vouchers be an expression of use value independent of the labour cost.

Althought it really isnt that, sorry.
Its an expression of use value and supply expressed in labour credits. Without restricted supply there wouldnt be a need for this.

(plz respond i wanna go to bed)

In the second chapter of Capital.

There are no "prices in labour vouchers". Labour vouchers aren't something you trade, more like rationing cards.

I know. But you can ration products by setting their "cost" to be shelf-clearing, rather than their cost. This prevents shortages by underproduction or leftover supply by overproduction, and the ratio of price to cost tells you how much to increase or decrease production in order to make sure all labour is allocated at a better social effectiveness.

This is an alternative to just setting a price at some level, which can lead to either over or undersupply. People are generally more ok with having things be a bit more expensive than not being able to get them because they couldnt camp out the door for a pack of juice because the labour price is too low.

*price in labour vouchers
its too late to discuss economics tbh.
2 am

Or you can do it by looking how much you've produced, then decide who deserves how much of it, and then write it down on a labour voucher.

The planning itself prevents that. And labour vouchers play no role in the planning; the expression of demand does ("hey guys, I need a new chair, can you make me one this month?"). The distribution process as a whole (be it the products rationed by labour vouchers or not) plays a role in the planning only as a statistic source of past demand.

Then they are not labour vouchers but rationing cards.
Also good fucking luck doing that for 7 billion people.

Idealism
What if all the chickens have to be killed because of birdflu? Just keep the prices the same? Why would you not just change prices a bit to reflect the current demand so you dont get breadlines or piles of shoes?
Or do you seriously think people will order their groceries a year in advance?

Anyway im going to bed, will see your reply tomorrow.

I think I understand this now, but I'm not sure if I can explain it very well.

"Rate of profit" is like the speed of the S/C+V ratio.
The capitalist is happy so long as the S/V ratio is going up.
But the pressure to compete in the market means a large portion of S must be siphoned for constant capital to accumulate, and the C/V ratio goes up.
There's therefore a tension between the S/V ratio and the C/V ratio.
If the S/V ratio increases at a lower speed than the C/V ratio, then the rate of profit decelerates (crisis).
I'm guessing then if the S/V ratio increases at a HIGHER speed than the C/V ratio, then the rate of profit accelerates - and that's a boom.

Anything that puts downward pressure on the C/V ratio would delay the effects of the falling rate of profit, i.e. anything that destroys or renders useless constant capital.
A crisis itself does this, which I'm guessing is why you get boom and bust cycles.

Not only this but all corporations function through central planning, and some of them are bigger internal economies than mid sized countries.

Labour vouchers are rationing cards.

I'll have a 7 billion people administration to do that, so it will be ok.

Not at all. Already today (and in every epoch really), the planning realised by every firm in the world is what prevents (to some extent) over- and underproduction. You are fetichizing commodities by attributing them the power to regulate their distribution all by themselves.

Then we'll eat less chicken. There's literally no way around it.

Just keep the prices the same? Why would you not just change prices a bit to reflect the current demand so you dont get breadlines or piles of shoes?
There will be no prices, for there will be no trade.
And if we kill all chickens, there will be "chickenlines", once again, there's literally no way around it.

No anymore than today, no. And yet your local supermarket is already able to plan most of its orders to its furnishers a year in advance; most of the unexpected circumstances finding their source in… the anarchy of the market.

people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/303/marxecon.htm
Read this!

The whole idea of labour vouchers is that you can spend them on what you want to. If you dont want that, then they are not labour vouchers, and you shouldnt say you support labour vouchers.

.t marx

Let's see:

First, Marx says:
>He receives A certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with THIS certificate
And NOT:
>He receives certificateS
>with THESE certificateS
What does it mean? It means that you don't spend labour vouchers, for have only ONE. It is a certificate, not a currency.

Then Marx goes on:
Nowhere here it is said the you can draw from the social stock what you want to. It merely says that what you can draw is limited by the amount of concrete labour you personally contributed.

And by the way, if there is no chicken in the social stock, you won't have chicken. Still no way around it.

That you are autistic and dont know that in german that expression "he receives a certificate" is not indicative of explicitly getting one, but generalized use of certificates.

It says you receive "a certificate for the amount of labour you did" not "a rationing card for a piece of chicken worth one hour". You get a certificate proving you did work, which you can use to draw from the stock. Nowhere does marx say "oh and btw we need to manually allocate stuff to people". There is price in this system, its the labour cost, which marx says here:
>and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
So there is price, labour vouchers can be used to purchase goods this way, labour vouchers in every incarnation have worked this way, and rationing cards for specific products are not labour vouchers, they are rationing cards.

How is this a difficult concept to grasp? You may not like labour vouchers but you cant just change definitions to something different and then claim you are right.

youtu.be/147Ie78Qio4?t=2552

Nice as hominem.

Maybe (I don't read German). But in this case you explicitly receive one (which is consistent with both English and French translations).
This is also consistent with the beginning of the former paragraph:

Indeed, your labour voucher is translated into products later in the process – that is: when you use it. And this translation depends on the social stock of products available.

Indeed.

How else will you allocate it? Telekinesis?

No, for there is no trade ("the producers do not exchange their products"), and "the labor employed on the products [does not] appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them" (ie: a price, when expressed in a general equivalent).

>>and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
My turn to give you a reading lesson then: "cost" has a much wider meaning than "price". It literally means: "what it takes to". For example, in the French translation:
Which could be translated as:

No, there is rationing.

No, they can be used to draw goods from the stock; they are not exchanged, as explicitly stated by Marx.

Which are?

Precisely: labour vouchers are not rationing cards for specific products, they are the tool for rationing all products (or at least all those that need to be rationed).

Oh I grasp it very well: your inability to think outside of the market framework, that is outside of capitalism itself, and thus to understand the social revolution that communism actually is, drives you to mistake it for the purely political revolution that you advocates for (be it anarchist or Stalinist) and the utopian society that, according to you should result from it.

No, its fucking not. It says "a", or "an", not "one".

People
Pick
What
They
Need
Within
The
Amount
Of
Vouchers
They
Have

Ebin man, I also like to inject words that make a quote mean the opposite of what it originally said.

Limiting access to products by giving people a set budget of credits and the products a price according to their supply and demand is rationing, because the products are already owned collectively, the price only functions to ration it.

A purchase in this context is not an exchange. There is no trade, its the using of goods that already collectively belong to society to a person according to how much they worked. Stop being such a fucking semantic antfucker. You know goddamn well what I mean, its just like how you can purchase a loaf of bread with a rationing card for bread.

The choice of a market system for prices is a conscious choice because it allows for individuals to spend money as they like, and gives the planners feedback in the form of price, which can be compared to their cost and the production changes so that the new price at the new production intensity matches its cost.

They're not. At least, Western market mechanisms weren't any more or less efficient than their centrally planned Soviet counterparts.

Vouchers are important yo.

Ammendment:
I really think one should not think of this price system as a "market". A market is a place where people come together to trade commodities with each other. This isnt what happens in this system. It is a labour voucher system where production is done for use, where people are given labour vouchers according to the amount of work they did, and where the goods produces for use are rationed so that there is no oversupply or undersupply.

Its not a market, its rationing with prices that can be changed to prevent empty shelves (which leads to some people going without because first come first serve) or piles of stuff nobody needs (which is wastefull). The goal is still production for use, the decisions are still made society, investment in production is still decided collectively, people are not not rewarded or punished monetarily for happening to work in a certain industry that is not in perfect equilibrium with the rest of production.

Maybe I'm just too ignorant, but I don't think I agree. They seem like an outmoded idea, and it appears to me that people spend far too much time arguing over the theoretical intricacies and ramifications of its operation rather than trying to come up with better ways of doing things. Like arguing over how Communism will operate on punch cards and reel to reel despite all the advances in cybernetic thought.

???
Dude cockshott (the guy who memed cybernetics into relevancy) and his system uses labour vouchers.
Have you read towards a new socialism? Cybernetic Communism relies on labour vouchers to work.

That may have been true at one point, but modern economics is all math right now.

Do political economy then :^)

Fuck… you got me.

But in all seriousness, I only say that because I'm doing a PhD in economics and I went in thinking it was going to be a lot less math intensive. Sociology might also be a good fit, but idk.

What kinda maths do you do? What kind of economics?
Do you think the LTV is correct?Cause it is

if he does, he should stay in the closet, Econ departments are way right wing, you will never get tenure as an open marxist. You have to pull a Paul Baran and get tenured before you reveal your power level

I'll say that I don't think it's correct, but its also not something I focus on at all.

And the math stuff that I find the hardest is mostly things involving linear algebra and calculus. But depending on what you study, you'll also be doing statistics, game theory, and whatever else.

How does an ancom community function, what do you replace cost/benefit and market competition with?

the only hard part of LA is the proofs, the mechanics of it are simple

In a planned economy, how does employment work and how are "wages" (for lack of a better word) paid? Do people choose which jobs to work based upon open positions? Is everyone paid the same for the same amount of time? If so, how are particularly shitty or difficult jobs incentivized for people to work them? If not, how are "wages" decided? Would there be quasi-price signals (for the workers) where undermanned jobs would pay more and overmanned pay less? Would there be similar quasi-price signals (for the consumers) for goods, based upon their supply and demand?

Why didn't you take bachelor of arts in economics? Bachelor of science in economics is more math intensive.

You really need to be more specific, a planned system has many different forms with different answers to all your questions.

I'm interested in all the forms and all the answers.

Mutualists and Marksocs like myself knew that all along.

I think this adequately explains the very simple problem I had in my own thread before about the wage-price gap. It seems user was correct, this is the crises of overproduction.

I also wondered if the implication of the wage-price gap is that certain companies will grow at the expense of others, and this leads to centralization of capital in fewer hands. Or, if Marx has a different explanation for that. It seems like if the total wages in the economy are less than total prices, then companies may compete for limited money at a certain instant in the market place. Any gains are at technically at the expense of their competitors, which only seems novel to me because capitalists would always try to smother the notion that the market can be a zero sum game. It seems it isn't in the long run, but in a particular moment the market is a zero sum game for limited wages. So limited wages in a market that will include prices potentially far above their capacity to fulfill will mean a small amount of companies will receive those wages as further profits, and the companies that paid them will recieve losses and possibly fail. Therefore, money centralizes in fewer and fewer companies.

Is this sound reasoning? Does it describe Marx's view or the way the market actually functions?

Russia now has less people in poverty than America lol

So im going to give you the answer for cockshotts system.

Everybody gets paid an hours worth of credits for an hour worth of work. You could implement something like "work easy", "work normal" and "work hard" which pay differently from each other (but not too much) which people are free to choose. This way you can make a conscious choice not to work too hard without making your co-workers spitefull.
Yes. They register as available with their skills and relevant jobs are offered to them. They can then choose what job they want to do out of the available ones.
Yes.
It is entirely possible to pay a select few jobs more than the normal 1:1 wage, but this has to be democratically decided and is only wishfull if those jobs wouldnt be done otherwise. Since the system is planned we have direct control over the amount of jobs and the wages.
Yes. In cockshotts system a plan for production is made the calls for x amount to be made. This amount then gets placed in the shop and "priced" so that there is no shortages or oversupply. You are charged this price, and the cost price is noted on the product too. The planners then take all these sales prices, compare them to the cost price, and try to change production so that the new salesprice will match the cost. I want to point out that this is not a market, because this is just according to what marx wanted in a labour voucher system. It just changes the price from the ideal (the labour cost) to slightly higher or lower in order to make sure there isnt leftovers or shortages.

And in this case, “a” stand for “one”. Besides the fact that if there had been several labour vouchers Marx could have used the plural (although, as you said, it would be grammatically correct without it), it is the only interpretation consistent with the former paragraph (and with all of Marx’s works really), where is stressed out the fact that there will be no more trade nor value (both going necessarily hand-in-hand).

Do you English? Read the full quote:
> Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers DO NOT exchange their products; JUST AS LITTLE DOES the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them
In other words: B does not either. My quote is perfectly faithful to the original one.

People don’t need vouchers: they need food, clothes, etc.
So either you have plenty vouchers, which you can trade for this or that product, the vouchers then effectively being a general equivalent, a currency, and thus cannot represent anything else than a quantum of abstract labour, that is: value.
Or you have one voucher that certifies the amount of concrete labour you’ve accomplished and allow you to draw for the social stock this or that quantity of this or that products, the specifics being necessarily determined the exact same way than the production: with central planning.
In the first case you have trade and value, that is the exact opposite of what Marx described: capitalism; in the second case you have lower-stage communism.

And when I say the specifics of distribution must necessarily be determined through central planning, just like the production, I’m not inventing anything. Once again, this is consistent with what Marx wrote a few paragraphs later:
>Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?
Unlike the “vulgar socialism” Marx was talking about here, you want to change the production while keeping the present distribution. But your mistake is the same: you cannot separate mode of production and mode of distribution. Any effort to do so will only result in either an unchanged mode of production, or the complete social revolution as Marx described it. Of course, in the end (ie: during the revolution), the second option will occur, but your efforts in advocating for your wrong theory can only confuse the proletariat and mistake it on its historic tasks, effectively delaying the revolution.

[1/?]

Can Holla Forums help refute this?

No offense, but you sound like somebody who has trouble reading technical manuals and the like. There is a limit how much an individual can obtain, an individual has a budget of consumption points for that, these points have something to do with how much work that individual does, products have points associated with them and the individual can choose within the constraint set by these points. Whether an individual has several vouchers tied to the person that get destroyed when used or gets a single document each month or whatever with an entry that gets overwritten with a lower number when that individual gets products with it is a detail. When C & C talk about labour vouchers, they are referring to an electronic card that you carry with you. You get lost in details and misread what the other person is saying or you are follower of voodoo logic.

Jesus fuck mate how autistic can you be to not realise that it ''doesnt make a fucking difference if you get one piece of paper that says "so and so did such and such amount of labour" and getting such and such amount of pieces of paper that say "so and so did one hour of labour". Its litterally just a choice how you write it down, you could just make it a digital card with digital numbers, like is going to happen when such a system is implemented in a modern society.

I explained several times already that using labour vouchers, WHICH MARX FUCKING ADVOCATES FOR, is a non-market distribution consistent with a planned economy and socialist production. Changing the """price""" of each product to prevent short term shortages or oversupply doesn't change the fucking distribution system.
Fucking hell man, stop your retardation, its scary.

Read Value Price and Profit. What happens in this case is a diminishing in the rate of of profit of the capitalist. A rise in price is not obligatory: there are more factors at hand

Here, i made an illustration. It litterally makes no difference if you use one piece of paper or more than one.

Prices tend to rise in the aggregate, but that's because now people have more money to buy things. However, it isn't a 1:1 rise. Paying your workers an extra dollar an hour doesn't mean you have to sell everything for a dollar more.

And like

says, I advise reading Marx, because porky has been saying that exact same shit for almost 200 years now. Wages go up and the economy doesn't die. And really, why the fuck would it? Paying workers more means that they can consume more. We saw just that in the 20th century where after WW2 workers had unprecedented levels of income and personal wealth, and it lead to a similarly unprecedented period of prosperity.

The only person that has a problem when workers get higher wages is porky, because those wages cut directly into his profits.

In case it isn't clear, the rate of profit is mostly arbitrary since it is flexible. What isn't so flexible for any individual capitalist, is the competition which will drive them to present a product at a certain price point representing the socially necessary labor time. If they refuse to do it, another capitalist can undercut them and gain market share.

This is all very vague and depends on market conditions, but in general we could say that competition will keep capitalists from raising the price equal to the rise in wages enforced by law. This is the same pressure that keeps capitalists from arbitrarily raising prices on any commodity to increase or maintain profits. Why didn't capitalists maintain prices of various commodities when machines made labor more efficient? Presumably these machines reduced their costs per unit, so why not just maintain the price and increase the rate of profit? Because they're in competition. The same competition that compels them to continue lowering prices after the government sets new wages.

BUT, we may expect further centralization of capital with higher wages, because the rate of profit will shrink and so the amount of capital required to make enough money to run a business and still be making more money than just being a high earning worker will increase.

Then why did the soviet union collapse on itself when it tried to compete with the US militarily?

I don't think I would say it "collapsed on itself," as though it were a natural development. The SU was the #2 economy on the planet up until its dissolution, which had more to do with there being direct interference by Western powers as it attempted to reform.

The US suffered numerous economic downturns/disasters as well, and they responded to it with a number of financial schemes that the Soviet Union couldn't. In particular, discarding the gold standard to adopt the petrodollar, as well as increasing the financialization of their economy.

In any event, it was politics that brought an end to the Soviet union, not the relative in/efficiency of their economy.

Are you fucking kidding me? Here is what you wrote in the very post I've just answered:
>The choice of a market system for prices is a conscious choice because it allows for individuals to spend money as they like, and gives the planners feedback in the form of price, which can be compared to their cost and the production changes so that the new price at the new production intensity matches its cost.
Or am I "injecting word" again to make you say "the opposite of what you originally said"?

Not only do you openly admit that you want to keep markets, but you even explain that you see prices as a way to "give the planners feedback". Literally how could this happen if the prices are set by the planners themselves? The only way prices can provide such a feedback is if they are the result of a bargain, of a trade on an actual market.

And your "amendment" (>>2022698), while not that openly wrong, still denotes your confusion:

And what do you think will happen when your prices go up? You think no one will "go without"?

How the hell does setting prices help you not to pile stuff nobody needs?

And yet you want "the price to match the cost". In other words: you want a profit. Your vision of communism is literally: "capitalism with all profits equal to zero".

With this "detail" that the prices have to match the costs. So society decides… within the limits of the law of value.

Must the prices match the costs or not? Mustn't "the production change so that the new price at the new production intensity matches its cost"?

Once again, you seem completely confused. I have no problem with attributing "points", several vouchers, or whatever (I'm saying this for you ) as long as it is extremely clear that it is in now way a survivance of a market. Then, and only then, it is a technical detail that must be treated as such; and in this case my opinion is that we must at all cost avoid any formulation that could generate confusion.

But, as I've just shown, nothing of this is clear to you. You are not discussing hypothetical technical details of the future planned production. You are clinging to the very essence of markets; you are fetichizing commodities (that is: products with prices), attributing them a power of their own ("give the planners feedback", "rationing").

Of course you feel (confusedly) there is a problem with keeping prices and markets, which is why you insist on them not being "real" markets, but this just makes you self-contradictory, and this is a contradiction you can only solve this by getting rid of your commodities fetish. Trust me: the sooner you do that, the sooner you'll realise there is literally no point in expecting to keep prices in communism.

I explained here why I dont think "market" is an apt description of the system in place. I only use it because you use it, so the conversation is easier.

The prices are set and adjusted so that all of it sells without shortage, just like the prices in supermarkets are not set by bargaining but by a central commitee. Its not hard to do so. Changing the cost of something to ration it in a rationing system does not require trade, as ive explained in my ammendment.

If there is shortages people go without what they would have ideally wanted either way. By upping the price we prevent one person from clearing the shelves and the mother who has to bring her kids to school not getting any because she didnt camp outside the store.

You lower the price below the labour cost so that people buy more of it, until you reach a price of zero, at which point it is no longer scarce and you can just make as much as people want to take because you can.

Making it so the price to take it is equal to the cost to make it, is what marx says the lower stage of communism will be.

If society wants not to produce a certain commodity for whatever reason, such as cigarettes, they can choose not to, or produce very little and make people who really want it work more hours to get it to dis-incentivise it.

Yes? People are still just paid the hours they work. Society collectively decides what to invest in and where to increase or decrease production.

No, you are, because you are confused and calling the harsher or more lenient rationing of products a market. Its not a fucking market. No trade is done. They just ration it harder so that everybody can get some if they want to, or ration it less, so that they dont have leftover piles of stuff.

Commodities are goods produced for exchange. These are not, as ive explained, but you ignore.

Wew im sorry i talk with symbolism. People set the prices to ration what is produced. These prices can then be looked at by planners, compared to their cost, to make informed dicisions.
Is that better?

Because they arent fucking markets. The fact that you "buy" goods with labour vouchers is exactly what marx described. The only thing that is different is that we dont "price" them exactly equal to their cost of production to avoid over or undersupply. We then can see which goods had to be prices differently from their cost and change production to make sure they can be priced at their cost. This goes on until we can make enough of these scarce products they are no longer scarce, and that we dont need to ration anymore.

Also I think you are just viewing me as some kind of stupid strawman who can only think in terms of markets. Some stuff should be distributed via labour vouchers as i described above, like luxery goods, clothes, holidays, whathaveyou, other things should be distributed in a pure rationing system without any kind of money or labour voucher system, such as healthcare, public transport, roads, firefighters, water, education, etc

Those public service things can easily be blanket solutioned, they can easily be rationed and people will accept it. A monetary solution would be undesirable for them.
The economic dicisions whether to make poptard A or B, whether or not to bake triple chocolate cookies or make diamond encrusted cockrings are not blanket solutions and highly volatile over time and dependent on personal prefferences. As such, a labour voucher solution would be ideas for those things, which would also allow people to choose the intensity at which they wish to work without making their comrades bitter and spitefull because they get scarce luxeries without working for it.

To tl;dr this:
People are generally fine with free healthcare, even for the lazy and relaxed, they are not fine with free caviar for the lazy and relaxed.

Just as an aside to what you're saying, if you haven't already said it, you can have a government in a labor voucher socialist system that still scrapes off some of the vouchers as "taxes" and allocates them in a welfare system that is meant to ensure nobody "goes without" in the case that they simply can't work for some reason. So everybody continues working and getting vouchers if they can, use those to get stuff at the communal stores or whatever, and people who can't work because they're old, young, sick, or whatever it may be can get assistance.

But otherwise, I think there is a misunderstanding about the point of this kind of system when referring to the possibility of people "going without". As a matter of a commonly held socialist ethic, it seems likely nobody would want people to feel need in any significant capacity, but the labor voucher system itself is a system of accounting for production and distribution in a society still experiencing scarcity. It reflects real conditions of production. If there is a shortage of a good, it isn't a consequence of labor vouchers that people will "go without". Even if the quantity required to receive some item is low enough for anybody to get, its shortage relative to demand is going to inevitably lead to want. So the real problem is production, and in that case I think that the plan should look to slightly overproduce most common goods in order to make up for any fluctuations in demand. Any perishable excess can just be recycled or trashed as it is now. Hopefully the margin of overproduction would be less than what we already experience, but it may be better to overproduce necessities, rather than try to be frugal and experience shortages which could actually hurt innocent people.

I know, Ive read cockshott.

I like the ideal but when you live in a city with several million people, you shouldnt have to rely on compassion of the millions of unknowns for your food or clothes.

That is what I explained. If there is a shortage of food, people want more than there is. So you give everybody a few points on their plastic cards, make the food cost a few points and this way people can choose if they want apples or oranges.

Producing more products for society is always good, but not when it is at the expense of other products. Also, you cant "overproduce everything" because the total price of all products is equal to the total amount of labour done and the total amount of credits in existance. If all products are produced in exactly the correct proportions to their cost, then all products by definition cost the same as their labour cost. Its physically impossible to overproduce all products at once as long as they are scarce. Only when a product has a zero price can you start to truly overproduce, but then the product also litterally isnt wanted (its free) so it just goes to waste.

When I talk about "shortages" i talk about general, all products. Not dangerous shortages such as food or water. Obviously society would choose to ensure that there is always enough food, with a good buffer, and the same goes for all important products.

You dont need to overproduce and buffer fidgetspinners though, you just try to make just enough so that the price they sell at is equal to the cost.

(me)
Additions because i dont feel like i explained it well enough:

When you need to ration, people by definition arent able to get what they would have ideally wanted. If you dont ration correctly and make it too easy to get them, then some people will be able to get more than others by virtue of being first. Inversely, if you make it too hard to get them, you have leftover shit nobody can get. So you need to ration just right, which in a labour voucher system means changing a price.
This has a nice consequence of showing which things are more wanted than others, prices of wanted goods will be higher than unwanted goods in relation to their cost. This difference can then be used to change production to decrease these differences and allocate labour so that products are produced more in line with what society wants.

People can choose their favourite fruit, while everybody gets some fruit, instead of some people getting lots of fruit and other very little, despite them both wanting it equally and having worked for it equally.

Fuck me, i start writing and forget what i really wanted to say in the first place.
This is why i meant by "people go without what they would have idealy wanted". This is a shortage, because you cant just give it away for free and have enough for everyone. Its scarce, theres a shortage and we need to keep making more of it until we have enough for everyone.

If you are who I was replying to, I don't think we are in disagreement. What I wrote was for the sake of the other guy, so I probably should have said "in addition to what you are saying".

In the second point though I wasn't meaning to say people should rely on compassion for food and clothes, but it seemed to be that the other guy was creating a moral dimension to the labor voucher system. To me, labor vouchers are just an amoral accounting method that represents the productive capacities of the economy. The value of labor vouchers is in whether or not it is efficient and effective for its purposes. It isn't labor vouchers as such that decide whether or not certain people are taken care, since it is always the case that those that cannot work are at the mercy of those who can and do. I was just trying to say that the desire to help those who can't work would just take the form of Cockshott's socialistic welfare state.

BTW same guy who is being accused of "being an idiot" "confused" and "unable to think outside of prices" here.

I think that the first world can produce more than enough food for its citizens to make it free and just eat the labour costs through a tax. Since you control the distribution nationally it cannot be exported to foreign nations. The only reason food and stuff like that still costs money is because if one nation decides to make it free, immediately operations will start to in mass transport this free food abroad to sell for profit. In a market system you cannot control who you sell to, since it can just be resold. In a labour voucher system you could do this, since all transactions are tracked (you could still need to pay 0 for food for bookkeeping purposes) and vouchers cant circulate, so farmers couldnt illegally sell this food to black market dealers easily. It would still require border checks and shit, but its a lot easier to do with labour vouchers than with a market system.

Ah ok. Makes sense.

Fuck i should really think if im done before I post.

The reason why we can make healthcare and all that shit free is because its a service, not a product. In a market, you cannot resell a service, so you have control over who can and cant consume it. With a product it can be redistributed or sold.

Rate of profit is literally the S/(C+V) ratio.
Not necessarily; captial tends to flows from lower to higher rates of profit (which, in a situation of perfect competition, would lead to an equalization of the rate of profit among all industries)
This is not quite true; more precisely, if C/V increases sufficiently faster than S/V, then the rate of profit will decline.

A crisis itself does this, which I'm guessing is why you get boom and bust cycles.
This is the basic argument of the "Falling rate of profit" theory of crises, which I think is quite convincing. (There are other schools of thought/interpretations of Marx, but they seem less plausible to me).

I have read this post like 10 times and I don't get what you're saying. V and C are both being reduced at the same time?I thought he was saying the opposite.

nvm i'm an idiot i thought you were referencing an earlier part of the video

Can someone explain why Marxists belief that all economic value comes from labor? I don't think I buy this. I think exploitation of labor by capital is common sense but I don't think labor-power=value follows from this. Are all other commodities involved in the production process not as important as labor?

What do you mean by economic value?

Exchange value i think

How can you actually measure the productivity of a worker under a capitalist economy and deem that they're being exploited? If a worker is being paid $8/hr for their labor, how can you tell how much value they're actually creating in the first place?

To clarify, if I'm working in a plant manufacturing TV's, and each TV sells for $800 on the market. After calculating the costs, the profit from the TV in exchange is $200, is this $200 the surplus value of the commodity? If so, then if there are 20 workers in the plant each operating at the SNLT, then is the $10 the surplus value or profit being exploited from me?

I'm a novice in the theory, but it seems like a hard thing to answer because exchange value isn't necessarily determined by labor. As I understand it, exchange value is prior to prices. It is the theoretical relative quantities of goods that can be exchanged for other goods. So 2 apples for 1 bag of spinach or something. Exchange value is taken to be equal to value in perfect conditions, but obviously Marx doesn't think this is likely to ever be the case. Value itself is determined by labor meeting the discipline of the market. As in, value is the average labor time required across the capitalist system to produce a particular commodity.

This is more an attempt at conceptualization on my part, but I think value can kind of be understood as a social process of production that underlies the magnitudes of commodity prices we see on the market. As in, a shoe or whatever can have its value changed based on how much average labor is required to make it on the market, so we can see that the shoe mediates its value. The value is obviously attached to the shoe as a commodity, or finds its expression in the shoe, but the value itself seems to be independently behind the shoe. I'm not a physicist or chemist, but I'll go out on a limb and say you can also think of it in the way that atoms are reducible to common parts that, when recombined in certain ways, are considered different atoms. So the certain configuration of subatomic particles are scientifically categorized as the atoms that they manifest, but those atoms are also described by those fundamental, equal determinants which find themselves expressed in all atoms. In a similar way, the different commodities are considered quantifiably related through the amounts of labor hours that express themselves through them. So in this conceptual framework, we would say that if all horse carriages were no longer desired on the market, that any horse carriages which were produced would by definition have "no value" because as we said before, value is determined by labor disciplined by the market, so the labor used to produce them would not be related to labor in any other part of the capitalist economy by virtue of the fact that they do not exchange with any other commodities in the economy. Therefore, the horse carriages have no value.

Marxist value DOES have the presupposition that commodities with value are desired, but the reason this isn't highlighted or explored by the theory is because Marx is exposing the connection between commodities and the fundamentals of production, as in the total labor available in the economy and how it is utilized in the capitalist system. You might say the economy is not limited by desires, but it is limited by labor. In this way, labor is more of a determining factor in the movement of the economy. As he explains through the fetishization of commodities, people see prices and they see objects and are mystified about the actual social process of production that is occurring, that there is basically an amount of labor disciplined by the market to produce these objects which exchange with each other, that this process of exchange directs the concert of labor harmonizing in the macroeconomy. This kind of language indicates to me that Marx believes people have a basic ignorance about how the economy functions, and he wants to identify things that may otherwise be considered pretty common sense. It is then through the further exploration of value that Marx comes to all of his predictions about capitalism.

...

Yes, that's the surplus value. If you were a worker at that factory, you're being robbed $10 a TV.

Since all value is produced by labor, every penny of profit is the stolen labor of the workers.

Oh, come on. Look at the first occurrence of "price" in our discussion:
Prices can never be an expression of use-value. The only way to express a use-value and evaluate the opportunity of its production in regard to the concrete labour it requires is through a conscious decision, through planning.

But what do you say a few posts later?
"Idealism"! In other words: "planning can't work on its own, there must be something else". And what is this thing, if not a market?
And here vanishes the story you're trying to tell me now about """prices""" (with a lot a quote marks, as if it's gonna change the slightest thing to what they actually are) merely being a technical detail of the planning itself.

See, this is why I say you're confused. You want to get rid of markets but you don't want pure planning; you want an in-between. Problem is: every time you get into the details of why this in-between is needed or how it will work, it all boils down to… the myth of markets' superiority in allocating resources. And back to the markets it is. The reason for thar is that this in-between exists only in your head, it has no material reality. In reality there are only two options: markets, or planning; capitalism, or communism.

And your last post provides yet other illustrations of what I'm saying:

By who? Planners, producers and consumers are one and the same. Moreover, they represent 100% of the population. So they have to be the ones setting the prices. But for what purpose? To give "feedback" to who? To themselves?
These prices either have no substance, or they come with a distinction between producers and consumers, producers from different branches, etc. In which case you have… a market.

But planning the production already does that. We produce what we need, just what we need, and with the priorities we decide; hence, no overproduction, and as less shortages as physically possible. What makes you think we need to juxtapose another process on the top of that?
By the way, the shortage will still be there even if you adjust the prices: it will only be masked, because you chose to compare the supply with solvent demand rather than all of demand.

But they are set by bargaining: consumers can chose another supermarket.

Or you can literally prevent one person from clearing the shelves, and the mother is fine. Once again, you are juxtaposing a market mechanism where there is no need for it.

No, I don't think you are stupid (nor did I say you were an "idiot", despite what you claim a few posts below).
I am actually viewing you as… me, a few years back.

For a given pile of stuff, having prices and a relatively egalitarian distribution of consumption points makes more sense than things being "free" with the rule first come, first serve. In the latter case, if people expect that some things will be scarce, they will queue for just about anything free and scarce, since it then makes sense to get things you don't need yourself in order to exchange them. Queuing isn't free, it eats time that could be used for productivity or more interesting leisure activities than standing still. Black market bartering is also very time-intensive and silly. With the point budgets, limited stuff can go up in price and so be rationed in a way that people who care a lot about getting it are more likely to get it (remember the income distribution is rather egalitarian, though you get a bit more by working longer) than with the queuing chaos idea.
The prices aren't only used to distribute a given pile of stuff, they are also used to get information about what people want.
That's like saying that I am a murderer, and that the amount of people I murdered is zero.
You:
Also you:
>you don't spend labour vouchers, for have only ONE.
Your posts are very stupid and you write like a French Aspie.

Im not going to keep replying if you just keep ignoring what I say mate.

All supermarkets have the same price you absolute autist, just like today. All supermarkets are collective property, just like all factories are.

Dude, just admit that you dont support labour vouchers, but instead support a set limit of items per person. You keep claiming that you support labour vouchers when you actually just support having a maximum amount of toiletpaper you can buy.

Forgot to add:
READ COCKSHOTT
THE "MARKET" I DESCRIBES IS NOT A FUCKING MARKET. PLANNING DOES NOT EQUAL DIRECTLY ALLOCATING BOXES TO PEOPLE.

>The prices aren't only used to distribute a given pile of stuff, they are also used to get information about what people want.
I will ask once again (and once again I'm pretty sure I won't have an answer): how do the prices set by the people give them information about what the very same people want? Why do they need this intermediary?

Because the prices are not set by an almighty alknowing fucking god, they are set by whoever distributes that product. These prices can also change if demand suddenly changes.
People set prices, those people arent a (relatively) small group of planners, because they cannot set price for millions of products. They are set by an algorithm with input from the people working in the distribution of those goods.

There prices are then collected, compared to their cost, and that data can then be presented in a number of ways to the planners, such as individually in descending order, grouped according to type of product, by industry or another helpfull way. Then broad decisions can be made as to what to increase or decrease with input from all industries by those industries.

How hard is it to grasp that perhaps the people changing the prices to make sure the shelves arent empty or overflowing are not the same people who plan the factories?

Also:
Ratios are way more fucking usefull than vague ideas of how little you have. If the price differs only a tiny bit from the cost, you only need to change production a tiny bit. If the price is 10 times the cost, you need to massively increase production. You can't get this numerical data from "oh we have too little i think".
In addition to that, this data can be used by data analysts, combined with older data, to make predictions for what will happen when you increase or decrease production in sectors, and if it will impact other sectors. This means you can make a much better plan than "oh last time 10 million people couldnt buy buttwipes, try to make a bit more i guess".

But it's what Marx's labour vouchers are: a certificate of the concrete labour you have done, to which is attached a set limit of items you can draw from the social stock.

Except it does! This is literally what the word mean: you plan the production depending on what you need, that is: you express your needs (how many boxes each) before the production, not later.

The set limit of items is IN LABOUR TIME, not "maximum of x amount of thing y". You can spend your labour time however you want on the social stock.

And then you make adjustments of the rationing to correct for any mistakes you made, because it is literally impossible to plan a perfect equilibrium due to, you know, real life, where mistakes are made, data is not optimal, things burn down, crops fail, consumer demands change. This is what the price is.

You base your entire argument on a wrong understanding of what labour vouchers are.
Labour vouchers are a certificate that entitle you to take whatever you need from the social stockpile, within the limits of the amount you worked. It is not you can only take 5 boxes of toilet paper and 8 boxes of soap and if you work more you can get more toilet paper'.

Anyway I will not be responding to you because you keep ignoring the fucking definition of a labour voucher and keep sperging out over minor grammatical uses, the use of symbolism or the word "price".
I have used up all my patience. Fuck off.

Oh it is not hard at all. I understand very well this is how you see it and I mentioned it here:

But this is not communism. You have different people holding different positions in the production/distribution process: this is a class society. And not just any class society: this is capitalism; an utopian version of capitalism, with all its fundamental traits but none of their consequences.

See, in communism, there is no "relatively small group of planners". The "group of planners" is the entire population, as the planning and production processes are completely intertwined – and so is the distribution.

Precisely not, as Marx states clearly:
>The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. [He doesn't give abstract labour time to receive back abstract labour time]

But you did already, when you effectively worked on whatever you wanted.

And you don't need any prices for that.

Not at all. You can go on all day long, there's no escaping it: whatever the name you give them, your "prices" are either the result of a bargain on a market where different interests are opposed; or, in a communist society where they are set single-handedly by the very same people who plan the production, they are an utterly pointless concept (as long as the adaptation of production to the needs is concerned: hence why I am opened to discussing it as a specific way of pure distribution of an existing stock – but this isn't your position, you keep seeing it as a way to adapt production to the needs).

No it's not.

Yes it is.

Can someone explain to me why it is Machines don't produce value? I understand that they act like a fancier version of the hammer per say, Lessening the labor'rs work time, and increasing his efficiency. The machines are still ultimately extensions of the workers,
However, at what point can we say that the machines are producing value? What if the become conscious?

Pic unrelated

It's because of the very nature of value: human labour time.

care to elaborate?

Machines are predictable. You can predict exactly how many products are created during an hour of production. This also means that the value of the machinery and the value of the products created become very obvious. You can calculate them to the last cent. You can't do this with human labor. Additionally, if a machine can run without human labor, there would be no real value in it. Anyone with enough money could buy the machine and create the same products. The aspect of labor time is completely removed. As for why human labor creates value. A capitalist pays a wage to get access to labor power. The value of labor power is defined by the level of education and the average living costs in the area. However, what the capitalist truly wants is the labor input. The input is what used in the labor process, and is what creates value. The amount of value is indeterminate, and can only be realized once the product of labor has been exchanged on the market. This is also what determines if labor becomes socially necessary or not. If you can't sell your products, the labor was not socially necessary. The surplus value is the profit the capitalist made from selling his products after the production process. The surplus is thereby the difference between what labor power costs, and what the labor input produced (and what is retrieved is profit). The value created, which now is circulating within the capitalist system, can only be created by labor, due to the difference between labor power and labor input. Again if it was fully automated, then the market value of the products would be equal to production costs (if production is equally efficient), since the cost of every aspect of production can be determined. Since human labor can not be determined, it creates value. A very odd but essential aspect of capitalism.

Thank you user for the in depth post!
Now let me decipher it.

take that commies!

My gott

From wikipedia's labor theory of value:

Robots don't get paid and are not people.

The answer to this riddle is: because there are several of them. Several people. More than one, mkay? You got that? I just want to make sure that we are all on the same page here, so I will tell you something that everybody else in this thread already knows: In this world there are several thousand million people. We don't all have the same opinion about everything, we can't simply intuit what others want aside from what is the necessary physical minimum (and even there we have knowledge gaps because of allergies, for instance), and we have to communicate this shit somehow. Moreover, people themselves don't know what they will want or need in the future exactly, so we need to have some over-supply and trial and error, contrary to your fruity "theory" of what Marx "really" meant in
Read Marx:
>On the basis of socialised production the scale must be ascertained on which those operations — which withdraw labour-power and means of production for a long time without supplying any product as a useful effect in the interim — can be carried on without injuring branches of production which not only withdraw labour-power and means of production continually, or several times a year, but also supply means of subsistence and of production. Under socialised as well as capitalist production, the labourers in branches of business with shorter working periods will as before withdraw products only for a short time without giving any products in return; while branches of business with long working periods continually withdraw products for a longer time before they return anything. This circumstance, then, arises from the material character of the particular labour-process, not from its social form. In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labour-power and means of production to the different branches of production. The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate.
Source: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch18.htm (emphasis mine) Do you have any other brilliant question? For instance, you could ask: Why do people count votes if they themselves vote, so they should know the result already? You are truly the Academic Agent of Marxism.

pretty funny coming from ancap

tbf I'm shitposting, my paleocon "libertarian" cousin posted this one somewhere and I had to share it.

TANS is a good starting point, though just about anything in it could take some reworking. Take the proposed rule about how to adjust quantities produced, which is just standard econ101 supply and demand except the target is breaking even instead of turning a profit. What Cockshott and Cottrell describe is having an isolated calculation for each product (starting at reproduction cost, increasing price and quantity produced when demand empties the shelves faster than they can be restocked and doing things the other way around if demand is low). I understand that these isolated calculations have the advantage of being very easy to do, but surely products with similar uses are related in a way and that should be taken into account. Imagine two products that are almost the same, so completely ending the production of one of these wouldn't be a drama. When it comes to adjusting the supply here this sort of similarity should be taken into account.

Fuck, posted in the wrong thread. It was supposed to be in the cybernetics thread:

Ok I'll go with you on that before answering the rest, if you don't mind.

So there are several people; who set the prices? From example: my pack of rice from the supermarket?

-le deep frenchman
I can certainly agree with that. You are making progress: four words appearing together in a string that isn't nonsense. We are all proud of you.
Hitler. Hitler is setting the prices. Yes. You are very smart, asking the smart questions. It's not obvious from reading the thread what the answer would be, so you are investigating dat shit and asking the right question. The answer is Hitler. H i t l e r. So now that we got that issue sorted out, you can die in peace. Please die. Or at least, leave.

Bump from an actual answer.

for

Yeah, completely obvious: "people".

Oh wait, that's not obvious: there are several of them. So who's setting my rice pack's price?

And I just know realise I missed a part of the paragraph in the second capture:
My bad.

So what does this input consist in?

Is there any guide to this really confusing world of "proving" the LTV? (>inb4 Marx's "it doesn't need to be proved"; it makes the case for exploitation stronger if it is proved.)

As far as I know the debate focuses mainly around the transformation problem, and things like "TSSI", "Fundamental Marxian Theorem", Oshikio, Morishima, Kilman, Samuelson pop up here and there. Where can one read about the problem, its solutions, and especially, for the purpose of backup, alternative theories or explanations of exploitation which do not first assume the LTV?

I know it's a shot in the dark but if anyone has information about how to start studying this stuff, I'd be grateful.

What is it that you wanna prove, exactly?

I'm mostly interested in responding to criticism of expolitation, TRPF and Value in general, but I need to wise up.

I'm not looking to prove anything myself, just to get educated on what's out there at the moment in terms of modern Marxian economics.

Buddy, workers decide what gets produced and how its produced, planners decide how to source inputs, transportation and quantity of production

That's nice and all but that doesn't answer my question. Although you're most probably not the same user I was talking with, if you share his viewpoint you're welcome to answer.

If not, well isn't "deciding what gets produced" the same thing as "deciding quantity of production"?
And isn't "deciding how it's produced" the same thing as "deciding how to source inputs, transportation"?

No it isn't, and let me explain.

Workers at a cheese factory, the workers come together and decide we want to produce Brie, Camembert, and Gouda and say we want to produce using this particular type of method requiring this type of machinery.

Planners come back and say, how many worker do you have and what is the current state of production at the factory etc they gather data.

The planners organise transportation and calculate SNLT, quantity of cheese per day/week whatever, number of workers available, technological inputs and efficiencies

Planners requisition the equipment and raw materials from other work places who already produce them, farms for milk, steel mill for the machinery, electronics for co-ordination etc

The hours worked by the workers has already been calculated depending on the SNLT/Productiveness of machinery/Speed of transporation of inputs and outputs and number of workers available.

Where the goal is to simultaneous maximise efficiency of production (dont waste the cheese), and minimise SNLT (shorten the working hours). Since the quantity of cheese required is already known from data points of consumption overproduction doesn't occur, with at most a slight margin of error on top in case of spoilage.

If say the work hours are particular large for a certain industry there are two options, increase the amount of labour to that task so that the work load can be shared across more people OR develop advanced machinery and techniques to be more efficient

Workers at a cheese factory, the workers come together and, since the quantity of cheese required is already known from data points of consumption, they decide we want to produce Brie, Camembert, and Gouda [accordingly] and say we want to produce using this particular type of method requiring this type of machinery.

[Workers at the cheese factory ask for] the equipment and raw materials from other work places who already produce them, farms for milk, steel mill for the machinery, electronics for co-ordination etc.

[Workers at the cheese factory] organise transportation [by asking transportation workers to do it, just like they did for milk, machinery, etc.]

[Workers at the cheese factory naturally] don't waste the cheese and shorten the working hours.

Overproduction doesn't occur, with at most a slight margin of error on top in case of spoilage.

If say the work hours are particular large for a certain industry, [workers of all branches of industry meet in their Soviet and they have] two options: share the work load across more people OR develop advanced machinery and techniques to be more efficient.

***

No SNLT for the same result.

All those uber rich people make me sick

Holla Forums and Holla Forums synthesis soon?

Capitalism makes me sick.

Im reading Wage labour and capital atm, and Im a bit confused about the difference between labour and labour-power.
The way I understand it is: Labour is the whole process of making a commodity and includes the cost of running the machines, of buying the raw materials, and buying the labour-power of the worker. Labour-power is the ability of a worker to work.
Is this right, or am I way of?

Labour-power is the ability of a worker to work, and labour is what he does when he works.

Rothschild genocide best day of my life.

Killing the rich is fun and all, but it doesn't matter what family or group of specific individuals sit at the top, the system that causes the fucked up inequality is what must be attacked.

Pretty difficult to attack an abstract concept.

I literally do not understand the point of your infographic. You think Rothschilds aren't going to the wall when the time comes?

The SNLT is not an optional category, it is an intrinsic property of the production process. It always exists. It is the limiting factor must be overcome

Capital isn't simply an abstract concept though, it's a set of real social relationships (M-C-M' etc). If you remove the rich but leave the market in place, soon a new ruling class will emerge and you're right back to square one.

But it comes back to how best to remove the market? I find liquidating people like the Rothschilds are a necessity, they'll only subvert and derail.

Sure, if they prove to be counter-revolutionary (which they will be) then kill them, just remember that after killing them, we aren't done changing things.

Of course there will always be a SNLT. But what's the point of trying to approximate it?

You need to know what the SNLT because it is the time it takes to make a good, this determines the amount of labour required for production, and the quantity produced. Its an important variable in the calculations, in order for any useful planning to occur the SNLT has to first be known.

Isn't this concrete labour time?