/gpg/ - Gorilla Posting General

ew

what is democracy? Is it where everybody gets one vote, or it is it where each groups interests are catered for?

how do you define 'state'?

You may not like it, but it's true

Is it possible values were created because we must measure things with something else to make sense of its usefulness to us?

Values have nothing to do with usefulness.

They're brainlets who confuse price for value. Read Shaikh

You retard don't confuse gorilla posters.
Use value
Exchange value

Read Marx

Shaikh who?

Neither, really. It's a form of social organization where governance directly expresses the general will. This should not be confused with "democracy" as we know it or as it has existed in the past. Democracy cannot work in class society and cannot have career politicians.
Think of soviets without the party.

Should have said: Exchange value has nothing to do with usefulness except that something must have a usevalue to have an exchange value.

Some questions are too retarded to feature an inquisitive gorilla. A deformed enraged orangutan fits them better.

Anwar Shaikh, he has lovely lectures on YouTube if you want intro, if you want detail get his latest book

What is the TSSI responce to this?
mtholyoke.edu/~fmoseley/lrcgpric.html

What happens in market socialism when one firm starts displacing the other?

Same thing that happens in capitalism I would assume.

Do you buy bitcoins?

...

Gorillaposting isn't simple/stupid questions

They're supposed to be complex questions that encourage discussion

Ok then. Any question.

What is the marxist view of hedge funds ?

Is it possible to a minarchist and have a left-wing view of economics such as mutualism or socialism?

No just stop calling yourself a mutualist. You're clearly not an anarchist if you want to have some minimal state.

Is the value of the labor-power the same for every profession? For example, is the difference in wages between a janitor and a doctor due to supply and demand or is the value of the labor-power different? To my knowledge, it is the cost of subsistence that determines the value of labor-power, so I don't see how it could be supply and demand OR differences in value here because the price of subsistence of janitors and doctors are generally equal.

stopped

why did you stop?

Yes, production itself is a commodity or set of commodities (labor, MoP, raw materials, marketing, etc) and all commodities have an equilibrium price..

No. Even if the only direct causes are social, all of society has its roots in the material conditions, meaning you can (hypothetically if not practically) trace the causes back to something that's not social. In practice most social outcomes relate to something material pretty directly though, e.g. racism being a very useful excuse to deny resources to X group so there's more for the ruling class.

A state is an organization with a monopoly on violence or one with pretenses of such and/or aspirations to be one. Generally the state is or wants to be seen as the sole legitimate user of violence and the mediator of "justice" and matters concerning violence committed by others within its jurisdiction. In practice, states are not perfect monopolies and the boundaries between state, capital, and often organized crime is usually blurry. The state always has the ideological justification of being "sovereign" over its constituents and is at least on paper the sole authority when it comes to enacting or judging violence. If the state tells you that it bends to the demands of the people, then (if true) it's still a state because in order for people to use violence "legitimately" they still must rely on the state as a mediator through whatever mechanisms that involves.

Accumulation of wealth and power. Socialism isn't just "we get rid of the bosses." It's also "we get rid of capital" i.e. the M-C-M' cycle, which includes markets. That's where a lot of capitalism's inherent problems comes from.

Nothing special relative to stock trading in general. It's a form of capital and irrelevant under socialism.

You could be a "libertarian socialist" but it's pretty contradictory because the ultimate point of socialism/communism is a classless stateless society with no market where production is done for use. You are describing a "transitional phase" at best. People who see that sort of system as an end unto itself are ignoring the contradictions that would remain under such.

Value in this sense is the cost of production. A doctor has a higher value to their labor power than a janitor because a doctor requires much more training in order to become competent than a janitor does. In capitalism this cost gets incorporated into pay because doctors had to go to medical school and pay the very high costs to do so. In socialism, education will be freely available (even in the context of markets education is actually an investment, and the only reason colleges are run like businesses is to make certain people exorbitantly wealthy, which is also why college-educated jobs pay so much more under capitalism due to the inflated prices there) because education will be produced for its use, not for exchange. In communism the "value" i.e. investment of labor into a doctor's labor would still be higher than that of a janitor's labor, but not to anything close to the degree it is under capitalism. The question of communist janitors is an interesting one but most likely would boil down to everyone acting as janitor part of the time and everyone keeping things cleaner because of the shared responsibility.

who gets what when everyone produces for use

because "janitors and doctors" is the hallmark of a useless conversation

The point is to achieve post-scarcity (scarcity being the situation where the supply < demand in modern econ terms), so everyone can get what they want. Until that point though, there would have to be some standard set up for how to distribute things. It's important to point out though that for a lot of things we are already in post-scarcity except for the artificial scarcity imposed by prices. There is for instance enough food in the world to feed everyone. And a lot of scarcity relates to various degrees of "luxury", but in communism we wouldn't produce "luxury" items as distinct from "consumer-grade" items or what have you. We would produce everything to be as high-quality as we could (without the inflated costs inherent to premium brands and the like), and distribute to as many people as possible. Communism won't appear in a vacuum though, so for relatively permanent goods, the first people to get the new stuff would probably be the people who don't already have one. For a simple example, if we start producing commie cars, then the people to get them first would be the people who have little to no access to transportation (and who want the car). But then over time people would trade in the old cars for the new better ones as more got made. However we'd do it, it would have to be arbitrary to some degree but also so dependent on the context that it's hard to describe what would be done in much detail.

TL;DR it's not as big a problem as it seems to be any more, and one of the goals of communism is to make the problem irrelevant.

activates the almonds