Prove it's possible to abolish "value"

Stated another way, prove the problem is "generalized commodity production" for exchange, placing the focus on consumer markets and corporations, rather than, say, global financial capitalism and central banking, which are presumed to be merely secondary artifacts/epiphenomenal.

By what process in actual reality, does "value" or "ABSTRACT human labor", in ALL its dimensions, get firstly, "extracted" out of activity, then "congealed" or "stamped" or "objectified" INTO, onto or around, commodities? Whether in material reality, where these FORMS are supposed to reside, and as you so frequently claim unmediated contact with. Or in the ethereal nexus of "social relations" both obscured and visible. What is the ONTOLOGICAL status?

If it is not all just another German Idealist historicist cathedral in the sky, just with Plato switched for Aristotle, and Capital cast as Weltgeist… be PRECISE. Especially explain how this process might operate for increasingly intangible commodities in the "knowledge economy".

Instead of implying Stalin, Mao and others weren't truly Marxist enough, or any other number of other excuses ("muh CIA read Capital and saved value!") I suggest they could not accomplish this, not for lack of exegesis or Bordigist purity, but because it's a RED HERRING. It isn't real. And it is NOT MATERIALIST.

Can you do this without simply deferring to an authority who allegedly has already solved the problem without your own summary? Or without implying some earlier "stage" of development that we can't revert to nevertheless somehow transferrable features?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sankara
endnotes.org.uk/issues/1.
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

No but to be fair you're asking for a lot. Just read Moishe Postone.

Easy, abolish the exchange in total, meaning, no property at all. None. No individual property nor private property. All is directed plan and assigned items which are attached to your id, not things you own and are yours to do as you will.

Come on lad, give me something. I of course know there have been a few attempts, but you need to jog your noggin on this to truly get the whole thing. This is the vital, deepest and whole crux of the entire problem of Marxism, the hidden center of its galaxy, everything that happened with the revolutions, academicism, inner sectarianism, the devolution into postmodern delusions, all of it. The sooner you guys can understand this the better.


This is essentially the proposed solution which motivated the entire revolutionary program. Whereby derivatives and such are considered secondary, tertiary, and so on, simply at a higher degree of abstraction of diffused value, and so irrelevant to the core motor. I'm suggesting this is wrong in the Ptolemaic way if you catch my drift.

Why is it necessary to abolish value?

Depending on how you have it defined, it is likely to be impossible. Things are worth what others are willing to ascribe to them, specifically the goods or services that people are willing to exchange for them. Economics and "markets" are simply the quantification of what has always existed. The application of a somewhat fictional objective value to social relations, favors, alliances, familial bonds, goodwill.

The "problem" is that objectification of value removes the humanity from the entire experience to the extent that these social relations become numbers on a page. It's hard to lay off a group of people you grew up with, whose parents and children all know each other. It's easy for someone to sit on the 50th story of an office building to wipe out entire labor forces with the stroke of a pen when they've never met any of those people.

Would there be any more value to the insistence that, being otherwise apart from the edifice of capitalist ideology and it's implicit cordons regarding the nature and organization of production - that the abolition of production of commodities for exchange constitutes, rather than a titanic shift of axioms, a necessary if not long-time delayed development in the organization of man' productive capacity - the necessary conclusion of ideological and economic contradictions which comes with the superseding of the capitalist model of production and its derivative forms?

So what you are saying is that we make everything the property of the planners.

GOTCHA

[parecon intensifies]

How will Parecon stop me from pimping my sister out for blueberry pies?

I suggest the dehumanization aspect is more a product of the economy of scale and technological society, and the related/orthogonal dialectic of quantification and rationalization. Precisely, people already were dehumanized in such a manner long ago in slave society, or in the sprawling administrations of such empires as China and Rome.

Hence, the plan cannot ever hope to dissolve this.


Understanding the ontology of value underlies whether it can be seen to remain the quanta of force and carrier of basic meaning in our conceptualization of the whole system of Capital. It is the "black box" and centerpiece around which all interpretations thereafter pivot, framing our view, but could it not be itself a derivative, a secondary abstraction in thought alone, that creates the deceptive, illusory appearance of its own drive, its elevation to prime mover status? This is vital to conceptualizing EXACTLY what these contradictions entail, as dialectical analysis makes it too easy to think we have circumvented the excluded middle of categorical thought, yet this does not explain the discourse of error throughout the Marxian corpus. Consider the level of recursion here: errors in "society" then reflected back into all thought mediated through the spiritualization of the underlying meta-logical machine, into the medium of suprapersonal ideology, and then building itself back again in a deeply encoded way into the material/real fundament. All the outgrowths in theory thereafter tend to overlay this core concept of value, for example, trying to grasp the varieties of subjectivities it conditions, or expanding on the architecture of the historical political economy.

"Value" is the key to the proposition that the exchange IS the problem. Which is also the deterministic problem of "what is to be done", namely, the mechanism of how Capital can come to re-entrench itself after the revolution, and so all the incremental steps and then compromises and experiments taken to prevent that. But maybe, just maybe, the revolution was jousting with a mere shadow, an epiphenomenon, of the deeper phenomena all along.

It won't. I will. With my fist of justice. You think you can pull that shit and get away with it, just whore out your family like some kind of insect? Think again kiddo, I will sneak into your room when you least expect it, and from then on, you will be in a world of pain. When you wake up after I chloroform you, you will be in a harness that spreads your asshole as wide as possible. I will be wearing my mission suit as I carefully climb inside head first. Each inch of my entire head, torso and limbs that I insert in there as i unbirth myself into you like some kind of reverse cocoon will be hell on earth. when I am fully inside I will spread my arms and legs and I will wear you as a misshapen meat suit as I go after each and every one of your customers. You will see all of them destroyed with your own fists as I unleash the power of the flaming claw technique and reduce each and every one of them into red paste with my bare hands. Face my justice.

What the fuck is this thread?
You can't abolish "value" because people will always value shit.

He means Marxist value, not colloquial value. They aren't the same thing.

So the idea is that without the assumption of the presupposition of the existence of the common/present notion of value and its necessary cordons - the errors in the socialist experiment and their analyses amount to little more than immaterial conjecture, which prima facie may suggest a thoughtful addressing of the shortfalls of bureaucratic socialism actually belie a more subtle commitment to what may necessarily be a fundamental embryo of the capitalist form of production? I'm not sure to what degree I understand value to constitute some essential form - free of ideological concerns and digressions, but I certainly agree on the underlying issue of Marxian impotence in confrontation with what would surely, as suggested in Capital, suggest the burgeoning of capitalism under the weight of its material contradictions in the face of overwhelming and unwieldy developments in the capacity for production. We may, more than ever, be faced not with crises of action but much rather a crisis of supposed action, which harbors no threat to the edifice of modern capitalist ideology.

ah shit right.

Your so called justice is a spook, meat. I have known that my whore sisters cunt was the best in the world since she was 6. You think you can get past entire armies of sex starved incels who have slayed their entire families for the chance to lick her toes? You overestimate yourself like all the others.

I keep her slut muscles in perfect shape by massaging them with a slurry of blitzed cock,blood and semen. I will fuck her bloody with your corpse as a condom, meat. I will drag you by your spiny broken legs, impale your stomach on my throbbing spike and run you through while a pack of niggers rips you apart. And when you are finally spent, I will give the dogs a go at your beautiful semen stained flesh before giving you to my sister. She always loves to watch that part.

Come for your death, hero.(CRAAAAAWLING IN MY SKIN)

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The fuck
IS
THIS
FUCKING
THREAD?!
I thought it was the big brained theory giants fucking about with their ideas of values but what the fuck is this shit?

Yeah pretty close. I suggest this has been the common thread running through all Marxian theory and the key to understanding its own unfolding, how it forced the syntax of thought about Capital and Communism. And also why Marxism in practice took on such an authoritarian and dogmatic form.

The reasoning goes: The revolution is incredibly precarious, and so if not handled EXACTLY right, by the competent experts of "value" backed by the full power of the repressive state, it would insidiously take root again by the back door. And the whole analysis of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary potentialities, again, to be handled by ANY means up to and including all military might, was premised on this. They were at WAR with value itself, and yet, it seemingly returned with a vengeance.

The aestheticization of value was a big part of what happened with Western theory. According to Adorno, the Soviet system was deformed - UGLY - because it was too obsessed with the calculative, rational dimension of value, which was its very dehumanizing character, while ignoring the phenomenal dimension in human experience it carried along with it, the whole point to begin with.

Communism is too simple, primitive, and childish to work, due to the fact it requires a lot of ironically blind faith in the human spirit to exist in the long term.(your mom is too primitive to work)

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t. hot take

you can abolish generalized commodity production no problem. The USSR did it for a couple of decades. Guess what, if you're not producing for profit, you're producing for use. MCM didn't exist in the USSR during the planning era, no matter what the leftcums say.

Abstract labor? no you can't and I don't understand why you would even want to.

A ha, you know nothing. I am the pilot of my own giant head. Stabilize! I can teleport anywhere. I will emerge from your urethra and expand into my normal girth and split your dick like a fucking banana peel and you'll find it hilarious because it is.

While I still hazard venturing too far into the excesses of discussing the immaterial of human experience, I do believe a mutual thread here is the concern with the resurgence of technocratic bureaucracy, only with a social flavor - an increasingly concerning phenomenon given the shift of the exchange of international capital, most recently, to the 'oriental' capitalism of China and other authoritarian capitalist states. That these might act a fortune teller for the future of conjoined state/private partnerships and the maintenance of the structural debt in the west. A Neo-Keynesian technocracy, that one trip would be overjoyed, I'm sure

Tell me a communist nation that lasted at least 100 years and didn't have famine, or a murder count that would make hitler blush with envy.

Thomas Sankara was personally a socialist but burkina faso wasn't a socialist country.

Read the faq, you idiots.

Even if so, moralizing against personality failings is an all too easy narrative. Don't you want to know how so many seemingly smart people could have been so wrong for so long? How these grand edifices of thought are built that both reveal and conceal an occult truth, if even only the Byzantine and infinite depths of human insanity? And how these schemes and visions can become systematic in real life though forever partially submerged in the darkness of our ignorance, in this reciprocal symbiosis between the worlds we craft and the pictures in our heads, that we're forever precluded from fully grasping?

My dick obeys
MY
will, not yours. I will expel you into your mother, stroke her bloated belly sensually with an AK47 and give you the abortion you deserve.

It's not real socialism, it's not real socialism! Socialism is the same as communism, a classless, stateless society!

The point is just to make labor directly socially instead of indirectly through market exchange. Let's talk about value more generally once we've dealt with the issue of exchange value, how about that.

Also, stop throwing out dumb hegelian and platonic terms, we're trying to deal with concrete economics here.

Also, no shit Mao and Stalin couldn't create communism, they had to transition out of pre-capitalist relations into capitalism first. That said, you can't really accuse them of not reading marx. Even if you think they are opportunists, you have to understand the structural reasons for why they did what they did, and not descend into autistic idealism about how Lenin was successful because he read muh hegel.

Will all revolutions ultimately fail unless the spectre of subjective value is first dissolved? Is the revolution not primarily to do with ownership but in the struggle against all kinds of exchange spooks?

So you are saying communism is like religion it is just blind faith and hope?

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Did I fucking say socialism is the same as communism? The USSR was socialist. China was socialist. Albania was socialist. When did Burkina Faso collectivize or institute economic planning? fucking retard

I swear to fucking god if I see you out on the street I'll kick ur ass you stalinist-freudian pseud

I was told there is a pie whore in here

His foreign policies were centred on anti-imperialism, with his government eschewing all foreign aid, pushing for odious debt reduction, nationalising all land and mineral wealth and averting the power and influence of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. His domestic policies were focused on preventing famine with agrarian self-sufficiency and land reform, prioritising education with a nationwide literacy campaign and promoting public health by vaccinating 2,500,000 children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles.[6]

Other components of his national agenda included planting over 10,000,000 trees to halt the growing desertification of the Sahel, doubling wheat production by redistributing land from feudal landlords to peasants, suspending rural poll taxes and domestic rents and establishing an ambitious road and railway construction programme to "tie the nation together".[5] On the localised level, Sankara also called on every village to build a medical dispensary, and had over 350 communities build schools with their own labour. Moreover, his commitment to women's rights led him to outlaw female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy, while appointing women to high governmental positions and encouraging them to work outside the home and stay in school, even if pregnant.[5]

From his wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sankara
you dipshit

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Do you think Sankara would have made a greater effort to do so if the country's literacy rate was higher? I just looked up 1983 BF and 1917 Russia literacy rates to compare side-by-side, and Burkina Faso '83 was 90% illiterate, while Russia in 1917 was >60% illiterate.

I don't think Sankara had the kind of political backing or time to actually start a socialist transformation. His power was really based on a coalition with liberals.

You have to remember he took power in a coup, not a socialist revolution.

I will not be so hasty as to suggest that Burkina Faso became a fully fledged socialist state, but to suggest that social oriented reforms were not made in service of an otherwise completely destitute populace. I do apologize for my indiscretion or suggestion to the contrary, that was unfair of me.

So, instead of using money i just barter for whores….with blueberry pies. So how many blueberry pies for how much time? Is the value of said blueberry pies subjective? I don't really bake but I guess I could learn

It depends whether or not you are describing a static or singular transaction, or a single piece in a forum of social exchange. Regardless of extenuating circumstance, I would like one pie please

oh boy this thread sure is something

The OP is unclear since we are not aware of the scope of the problem. What bad aspects of capitalism are we trying to attribute to generalized commodity production as opposed to central banking? Unless these issues can be isolated to capitalist industrial civilization, no genuine solution can emerge.

All ideology is like religion, with a "rational" and a visionary side. The human condition is blind faith and hope. At any moment an undetectable near light speed object could wipe out the entire earth, the true probabilities are incalculable.


You've presupposed exchange value is the problem.
Why? Why couldn't they just be left to do this on their own and the whole weight of the revolution be thrown against the actually capitalist societies? You just first assumed capitalism was inevitable everywhere - due to the telos of value detected in history, then accelerated capitalism by the vanguard, meanwhile the very real THREAT of the specter made concrete, forced Capital to double down on its own entrenchment in the advanced economies.
Without understanding value it might as well be neoclassical-tier.

Ok one pie. But what if the pie sucks? I mean I'm not a very good baker yet. Would lets say one great pie equal 3 bad pies in value?

In the interest of the abolition of the experience of value in commodity, I'll just say that I'm hungry and have little to no concern as to the specifics of the pie

There's a fuckton to unpack in your post and I feel like I need to start with one of the later points you raise against the left communist (in particular this is the one you touch upon?) critique:
This was never the thrust of the left communist critique. The left communist critique of the USSR, both as it being capitalist and not in general being desirable for the working class otherwise, always started with a materialist and historical argument: that the very position Russia found itself in starting from the defeat of European revolution after European revolution (which it, and Lenin says this himself, depended on for the prospect of communism, which could only be international) and Russia's own relatively very unfavourable position materially (largely unindustrialised, majority peasant, etc.) forced it to more and more accept the fact that its only solution were it for the Party to remain alive would be to assume regular capitalist development. It is from, very vulgarly, this need for the leadership to keep its aesthetic red and alive while also overseeing regular capitalist productive relations, that came its own ways of rationalising what it was leading as not being capitalist. Terms like hitherto never being heard before like "socialist accumulation" started to emerge in the discourse of its Marxism, and all those in the Party (n.b. fucking Bukharin), or even simply those in the country and wrote on it academically (I.I. Rubin), who objected to it were culled, because it threatened the internal legitimacy of the regime. The Russian counter-revolution starting around '21, which slowly but surely removed all proletarian character it previously, is an almost entirely self-inflicted affair, one which started way before the CIA was even established ('47), as most left communists will tell you Russia could be nothing more than red social democracy starting from, at the latest, '24. In other words, the
part here is just as absent in left communist critiques of Russia as based on some demonised vision of late Lenin and Stalin; these were all largely the product of circumstance.

However, this is not to say that their own views and, indeed, largely the views of Marxism in general, even today, most ultras today will think are misguided, and are indeed doomed to likely produce failure and their own counter-revolutions. Someone else ITT mentioned Moishe Postone (not an ultra by any means), who I think is a very key figure in reminding us of how Marx, or at least many parts in Marx, viewed communism as a process of proletarian self-abolition; one of creating subjects no longer mediated through objects (commodities, and all they necessitate and imply). This is something most Marxists hitherto have missed, or, in their "programmatist" and teleological, rather than self-negating views, of what revolution is, have been unable to instrumentalize a praxis for that didn't at least create the large risk of self-implosion, and if anything a re-affirmation of the worker defacto as his own class identity (the opposite of the ultimate product of the communist movement; the prerequisite for the existence of communism as mode of production). If you want a fairly short read on this thrust as it is more or less similarly found in the ultra-left, read this: endnotes.org.uk/issues/1.

Seriously, stop equivocating on value. "How much people judge something to be worth" is not what Marx means when he uses the term.

Ok, so the deliciousness of the pie is a value and factor. So the better the pie the more whores.

So … you can't be Socialist unless you are already rich and Socialist? Armchair Left strikes again.

Just so that we are clear: Soviets had a decade of State Capitalism (openly admitted by the Soviets), before they switched to Socialism. Nobody got killed for saying this. In fact, Bukharin himself was lambasted (twice - by Lenin; and in mid-20s by Stalin) for attempts to paint it as some sort of Socialism. Therefore, not only you are distorting events, even if we accept this argument at face value, we have no contradiction. Or did LeftCom present some sort of time-table with "120 years of Capitalism remaining"?

Also, source Lenin, please. AFAIK he said something different.

he didn't say this you fucking retard.

LeftComs, being the most autistic and zealous interpreters of Marx, simply noted the system wasn't meeting the transcendental ideal. But this was already obvious. By "social democracy" what they meant was repressive "state capitalism" orchestrated by Marxist intellectuals to engineer a class conscious mass with a "managed" (emulated) bourgeois revolution, which was the plan from the start, as if you were actually consistent interpreters of Marx, you'd know peasants have no "revolutionary potential" prior to collectivization and industrialization, and bourgeois revolution must happen under the correct historical circumstances first.

Your apologia of the so-called "LeftComs" is not relevant to the question of the thread. While I do find their ideas interesting and more theoretically consistent, in terms of their rigid formalism and auto-abolitionism and so forth, that is well after the metaphysical or phenomenological or transcendental status of value, the whole basis of everything else beyond "vulgar" economics, and especially the entire revolutionary (and even reformist) paradigm and abolition of exchange and notion of finance as a mere secondary phenomena, has already been taken for granted as settled.

USSR was not in any meaningful sense "socialist". Marxists long hijacked this word to mean the transitory stage into their Communism, an end goal which very few or perhaps none of you seem to actually understand at all. The extent it may resemble what you think a social system would be, were its citizens are relatively catered for, is the extent that doing so was seen as the most rational way to smoothly manage the existing power structure, and for the zealots, to continue to remodify their consciousness into the ACTUAL mass revolutionary ego. Which of course proved impossible, as with eliminating the ever elusive "value".