#commodity production

[ilysxmmit]

western leftists will call anarcho-communists white, western, petit bourgeois, american-backed etc because we criticize AES, and then watch madeline pendleton unironically 💔

yes bro the white, western, bourgeois american ML who's literally the CEO of a clothing company that works with megacorporations and sweatshops from china, and owns private property in new york, is clearly the anti-imperialist communist revolutionary who will lead the proletarian revolution. they're not a hypocritical anti-communist at all!

[positiveaien]

What failure to implement a socialist economy, leading to increasingly convoluted justifications for re-creating a bourgeois economy from first principles looks like.

[yngwrthr]

Marx’s theory of value (re divergence of value from price) explains the foundation of surplus profit, which is significantly related to the unprecedented wealth of contemporary moguls, and its association with technological advancements/ increased productivity— eg in industrial production, specifically improvements in machinery, more productive factories. With related technological improvements, more productive units become the measure of price (exchange value). But these technological improvements are not instantaneous — eg because all branches of production are not the same. Thus there are varying degrees of productivity. And the least productive initially influences market price/ exchange value. Hence surplus profits for higher productivity, while market price fluctuates above market value. However, after a certain point, surplus profits “equalize” with average profits via competition, market price gravitates closer to market value, and the rate of profit becomes the same for capitals across the board. Again.. this presupposes that re- production of means of subsistence/ labor/ society is determined by production of surplus value (profits / rent) and the “law of market value”.

Finally, Marx’s examination of surplus profit notes how the law of market value creates a “false social value”, based on exchange value instead of value, that exploits society in terms of consumption/ consumers. For me, this offers an important theoretical foundation for organizing exploited workers at the point of consumption in addition to organizing at the point of production. And not only against capitalist producers but against the landlords as well; particularly with present, even more exorbitant rents and related surplus profits.

[anarchistin]

Source

[yngwrthr]

But the point is, “not only that the different magnitudes of commodity values are measured by expressing the values in the use value of one exclusive commodity, but at the same time that they are all expressed in a form in which they exist as the embodiment of social labor and are therefore exchangeable for every other commodity, that they are translatable at will into any use value desired.” The labor contained in the commodities “must be represented as social labor, as alienated individual labor”. However, this is only necessary in a commodity producing society. Only in such a society does the labor of the individual have to represent itself “as its opposite, impersonal, abstract, general — and only in this form social” labor. Of course even a socialist society would have to “keep accounts” of the labor power at its disposal, and would therefore have to reduce individual labor to “simple average labor”. However, it would not occur to it “to express the simple fact that the hundred square meters of cloth required one thousand hours of labor for their production… in the oblique and meaningless way that they have a value of one thousand hours of labor”.

Roman Rosdolsky, “The Making of Marx’s Capital”, Vol. I, trans. Pete Burgess, London: Pluto Press, 1980, p. 123.

[yngwrthr]

Capitalist production therefore reproduces in the course of its own process the separation between labor power and the conditions of labor. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the conditions under which the worker is exploited. It incessantly forces him to sell his labor power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labor power in order that he may enrich himself. It is no longer a mere accident that capitalist and worker confront each other in the market as buyer and seller. It is the alternating rhythm of the process itself which throws the worker back onto the market again and again as a seller of his labor power and continually transforms his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him. In reality, the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist. His economic bondage is at once mediated through, and concealed by, the periodic renewal of the act by which he sells himself, his change of masters, and the oscillations in the market price of his labor. The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total, connected process, i.e., a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces the capital-relation itself: on one the hand the capitalist, on the other hand the wage laborer.

Karl Marx, “Simple Reproduction [of the Process of Accumulation of Capital]”, in Capital, Vol. I, trans. by Ben Fowkes, New York: Penguin, 1990, pp. 723-724.

[yngwrthr]

Posted with the goal of inspiring and giving all a more rounded understanding to grasp the exploitation of the working class under capitalist production. Short and dirty: capitalism — like a vampire from some pronounced horror film — “sucks the blood” of workers. I defer to “United Automobile Worker”, October 1937, to explain how despite all of their hard work, no wealth accumulates to the workers, they have no products to sell but themselves, and their wages provide some but are never quite enough to fully satisfy needs and wants. However, since labor power is unique, as it is the only commodity that can increase value and must thus be purchased for capitalism to survive — i.e. capital consumes an increasing amount of labor to survive — consequently a dependency of master on slave. This paints the picture of our current hell, but the power is all ours — or at least it seems a logical assertion.

[yngwrthr]

In order to understand the “full story” of the development of capitalism, we must turn to a consideration of the “value form” of products, which is identical with the “commodity form” of property and which in the same sense contribute to “commodity fetishism”, and results from the historical/ anthropological conditions of simple commodity production and exchange. Marx’s economic construction of “value form” is necessary in order to account for the “social form” of the products of labor in commodity societies that organize need and want however nominally through exchange and exhibit in embryo the system of private property and alienation. The commodity form of property and the value form of products represent only the very beginning foundations or initial conditions for organizing society around accumulation of ever increasing exchange value (capital). That is, commodity production and exchange based on the simple form of value prepare the way for capitalist civilization.

The course of the development of commodity production culminated in the emergence of capitalism, which is “mediated” through relations of production between capital and wage labor. Capitalist society begins in part with the generalization of commodity exchange and the further development of the form of value into the era of capitalist vs. wage worker. The value form is basic to these relations, imposed through the generalization of “non-restricted” exchange, and necessary for emergence of capitalism per se; as well as its reproduction.