bs

That's what neoliberalism (by the government) has done here really. Neoliberating things like health insurance and worker insurances so that employers have less costs = more profits, and the state has more costs but just raises taxes on labour, and lowering them on income from wealth, etc etc

It's technically true thanks to the industrialization that came with capitalism, it paved the way for the abolition of slavery. This is why the Northern US abolished slavery and not the South - they industrialized sooner and didn't need to depend on slave labor to produce cheap goods. The civil war finished the job and dragged the South out of the past (well, somewhat).

@@Lavabug that and the south has always been christian and the bible promotes slavery.

Yeah but Marx saw Capitalism as a positive development as well- before capitalism we lived in feudalism

It's not that we don't ; it's that most people have been distracted from it , in one form or another.

@@James-os9ku greed is revered- worshipped at every level in our society. If its every citizens duty to be greedier than yesterday then in my estimation, we do not.

It's like Michael Douglas character said in the movie Wall Street, "Greed is good." That's been a cultural belief for some time now probably really catching on during the Reagan years. Even the younger generation who have familiarity with these ideas still want to consume in large amounts and have plenty of money. Most will start to understand that the only way to do that currently is play by the rules of the system. Greed and pursuing wealth is embedded in our culture. Vast majority of people would not be willing to take on the sacrifices it would take in order to start to transform our system (ie striking, boycotting certain goods, reducing consumption). However the union activity is encouraging

@@justinmitchell9681 the invasive species of greedy colonialism killed off the native and diverse. Since the east india company in 1600.

@@hhheee3939 Good point. Greed goes back forever. I guess I was thinking more in terms of our recent culture compares to say the 40's, 50's and 60's when we had a more robust middle class.

Another zero sum view.

It is not the source of all value created as demonstrated by Bohm Bawerk. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ach4ktWDr9K8oKs.html

Not AI machines. There could be no workers at some point. Wolff is a con artist.

It's not the source of all the value. There'd be no value without the means of production. Plus, in your view, that the owner is only morally due the value of the capital, less wear and tear, is also not true, as if it was the case there'd be no reason to provide the capital, and the laborer would be sitting in an empty lot, with no factory, no machines..nothing.

@@chuckleaf8027 The problem doesn't arise from "capital having no value". It arises from the facts that: 1. Capital is basically part of raw material. Call it extended raw material, if you will. 2. And, more importantly, the owner of capital takes away more "surplus" than the capital alone accounts for. I guess you are equating "labor" with "blue collar worker", which is a fundamental misconception. A designer, a domain expert, anyone who's participates in transforming the raw material (capital + raw material in classic sense) through their skill or sweat is a laborer. This is why their salary is listed as "labor cost" in every balance sheet of every organization.

@@aniksamiurrahman6365 Huh? A white collar worker is a worker too. What this guy is saying is that the owner of the capital only gets what the capital is worth. This probably is not going to work... cuz the capitalist is not going to risk his capital for nothing. Similarly, a co-op is probably gonna have more trouble attracting investors than a traditionally set up outfit, where profit rightfully goes to those who started the business.....

Lol "takes responsibility legally for end user injury" they absolutely take no responsibility at all. Union Carbide, India. Case and point. Owners don't use entirely their own capital either - do you have any real idea of business financing? Or just the fake stories you tell to yourself?

"Classical economists developed the labor theory of value to isolate economic rent, which they defined as the excess of market price and income over the socially necessary cost of production (value ultimately reducible to the cost of labor). A free market was one free of such “unearned” income - a market in which prices reflected actual necessary costs of production or, in the case of public services and basic infrastructure, would be subsidized in order to make economies more competitive. Most reformers accordingly urged - and expected - land, monopolies and banking privileges to be nationalized, or at least to have their free-lunch income taxed away." - Michael Hudson (From Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital)

Government doesn't work? If I'm on the board of a large corporation, I wouldn't agree with that assessment.

No

@@gg3675 help me see how it's not zero sum as described between the timestamps above? A zero sum interaction is one where one person wins at the expense of what's lost by the other.

@@YashArya01 I was commenting on Marx’s analysis of production and trade, not Wolff’s brief description of surplus value. It’s really that simple. Marx did not see production and trade as zero sum.

@@gg3675 let me rephrase, 1) is Wolff's description above zero sum? And 2) does Wolff accurately describe Marx? Thanks.

@@YashArya01 It sounds like you want to arbitrarily restrain the conversation to a minute and ten second description of a component of Marx’s thought by Dr. Wolff, not learn anything. I’m not going to have a political argument with you.

The tragedy of the economic commons is the privatization of what should be a shared resource: the social surplus. The economic commons has been stolen and lost and the social surplus has been privatized. The majority has lost their ownership and democratic rights over the total surplus as the result of enclosure and monopolization. The consequences has been exclusion, huge inequality, and oligarchy. Instead of an orderly, rational, and collectively determined distribution we have an “every man for himself,” “war of all against all” distribution. The social surplus should be nationalized.

This won't work. It's based on the premise that people are influenced by morality and any review of history will quickly tell you they're not. There's always a way to rationalize it

That's why Marx was considering heavily on what Hegel was saying in the end that everything has a positive and negative no matter where or how you see it. It's sad reality

Except that is Mandeville's line (and to some extent that of the Physiocrats) which Smith critiques. Besides the fact that this flies flat in the fact of the Theory of Moral Sentiment's Sympathy, and the Historical Materialism in the Lectures on Jurisprudence (and book IV of WoN), it also doesn't really describe what Smith is doing in WoN, where he states that in terms of exchange, and not production, relatively free markets tends to lead to better outcomes because of relatively more useful allocation of labor (and also capital which he clearly understands as a kind of dead labor). He also points out many positions where this isn't the case, generally caused by politics and the self-interest of the merchant or capitalist. This is a misreading of, or really popular narrative about, Smith that could at a minimum be in large part qualified by actually turning to his works. Smith wasn't the Chicago school, nor was he for that matter any of his heirs Ricardo, Malthus, or Marx, though in many ways he was the closer to the latter. There's no way to understand Smith without Humeanism, which clearly is more more philosophically profound than laissez-faire, just like there's no way to understand Marx without Hegalianism.

Nescient much?

How did General Electric (GE) go broke? Basically, Jack Wells said let’s use our income not to continue to invest in making more electronic goods and services and appliances, let’s use it to buy our own stock that’ll push up our stock and essentially, we’ll just sell off our divisions and we’ll use the money of selling off our washing machine companies and stoves and sell it off and we’ll just pay it to the stockholders. That’ll push it up and by the way his salary was based on how much he could push up the stock of GE and he was paid in the form of stock options. Well, all of this is now the normal corporate behavior in the United States and corporations are no longer led by industrial engineers as they were a few centuries ago in the nineteenth and twentieth century. They’re led by financial engineers of the chief financial officer and the ideal of these corporations is to make money financially not by industrial investment….. so on the narrow microeconomic level finance capitalism is a way of basically selling out a company and giving the proceeds to the stockholders and the bondholders but as a political system, because it is so destructive of the economy as you’ve seen in the United States and you’ve seen in Britain through de-industrializing it, it becomes belligerent in an attempt to make other countries just as equally paralyzed by making these countries pay tribute to the U.S. and England and the financialized economies by means of financial engineering, by means of debt service, by means of selling their mineral resources, their public utilities, their land, their roads all to foreign investors-basically to who borrows the money that’s just simply created in the U.S. and to save all of their money in their central bank reserves in the forms of loans to the U.S. treasury holding treasury bonds which is how the international monetary system worked until just a few months ago when everything changed. So if you’re England and America right now you can look at President Biden’s speeches and he said well, China is our number one enemy because it’s competing unfairly. China is actually subsidizing industrial development by having its own infrastructure. It gives free education instead of privatizing education and making its labor pay for it. It has public health instead of privatizing social medicine like we do in the United States and making employers and workers pay for it. Well, industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century was all in favor of strong government infrastructure. The ideal of industrial capitalism was to keep the wage costs of production down not by reducing wages but having government provide a basic infrastructure to cover the basic needs of employees. The governments would provide free education so that employers didn’t have to pay for it. The governments would provide medical care so that employees didn’t have to pay for it and employers wouldn’t have to pay employees enough money to cover the education costs and to cover the medical care costs. The government would build roads and infrastructure and everything to facilitate the overall cost of doing business by industrial capital. Well finance capitalism is just the reverse. Finance capitalism wants to privatize and take education, medical care, roads, turn the roads into toll roads, and take all of these and privatize them and make them financial corporations that will essentially pay out their economic rent to the bondholders and the stockholders and this economic rent adds to the cost of education and everything else that workers need to live on so the result is to make it a high cost economy and that’s why Biden has said China and Russia are America’s enemies because the only way that America can succeed given our privatized economy, given the fact that Americans have to pay up to forty three percent of their income for rent, given the fact that eighteen percent of America’s GDP is for medical care, given the heavy student loan debt-only if other countries tie themselves in the same knot, only if other countries impose the same economic overhead on their labor force and on their industry can there be equal competition. If other countries have a mixed economy and are more efficient because they have an active government providing basic needs, that’s “autocracy” and that’s the opposite of “democracy.” Democracy is where everything is privatized and ultimately the one percent own everything. Autocracy is any government that’s strong enough to have its own public investment. Any government strong enough to tax or regulate the financial sector is called “autocracy” so the U.S. in the 19th century would be called an autocracy as I guess the Austrian school called it - civilization is basically an “autocracy.” There never has been an unmixed economy without government regulation, without a government investment, although Rome began to get to that point at the end of its empire and we all know what happened to it. So basically, finance capitalism is a predatory international economic policy aimed at draining the rest of the world all to pay the leading one percent of wealth holders in the U.S. and their satellite oligarchy in England and a few European countries.

@@jgalt308 A guy who writes page long answers in response to his page long posts might want to consider a hobby. Or link to your latest book.

@@massivecumshot Are you giving us a demonstration of your reading comprehension skills? There are no responses here...there is a limit to the amount of text that can be used in a comment...information that exceeds this limit requires multiple posts. If you have a problem with this, then your problem is with the platforms that have caved to the censorship requirements of the government which prevents "links" from being posted to "videos" or articles in order to prevent mis-dis-malinfomation that is in conflict with the "official narrative" on covid, ukraine, etc. But thanks for playing.

Adam Smith was from Scotland yes, although i had always assumed he was from the otherside.

By Wikipedia, he was born in Fife, but went to Glasgow University at the age of 14. He stayed in Glasgow for most of his life and also died there.

Assets that can make you rich Bitcoin Stocks Real estate

Most intelligent words I've heard

Nescient much?

Ah yes. Marx, the famous forgetter of explaining the means of production 😂

@@Mildau30 Who provides the means of production? Not the laborer.. What use is Marx's theory if he omits all the work setting the enterprise up, long before mr holy worker guy shows up?

@@Mildau30 So all businesses are owned by trust fund babies? Millionaires who were already millionaires? Nobody gave me any start-up money for my business, so there's at least one "capitalist" who thinks you're full of it. You're right that i saved up as a worker... but for some reason I got my lic. and went on my own... Odd huh? Not sure how you propose to solve your errr.... problem, but it looks like it's outlawing employers... Where does the capital come from then? The workers pool their money? Why not let them do that now? Oh, we already do let them do that.... so what's the problem? Seeing a fancy car, or house? or one homeless guy thinking another homeless guy's tent is better??? Looks like you, and Marx were/are just dreaming up theories to cover over your envy of the successful...

@@chuckleaf8027 Nothing you say would count as actual "analysis" under any basic academic scrutiny. Throwing anecdotal evidence and some wishy-washy claims, without anything concrete to back them up, means your "analysis" would get an F.

@@chuckleaf8027 Yes, except of one or two fringe example, all the Billionaires today had multi-millionaire parents.

That question “where do workers go when machines take over”...was answered two centuries ago. That answer had been suppressed for two centuries in America is why you have to catch up. You need the background info to understand the answer.

Understanding history is critical for understanding the present.

@@areaunderthecurve9918 👍

Please do not ask questions or disparage our dear leader. The thought police have spoken and you must comply!!!!!! (or suffer dire consequences..)

Because ideas are impervious to time, To reduce ideas down to inconsequential blips of time to correspond to dead men is stupid. Ideas live on.

@@Mildau30 capital can refer to land, machines, structures, and investment money. Its okay to group things into a concept.

@@Mildau30 please provide an example

@@InventiveHarvest so marx was right then??

@@DJWESG1 oh yeah communism is awesome - not!

@@InventiveHarvest Marx's main concept was - economies should be organized in such a way, capital is owned by the people who provide the labor. Yeah, that's an awesome idea, and it's called socialism, not communism. Or may be not. May be, owning the fruit of your own labor is an "evil" idea.

nah, even "unskilled labour" provides more value.

If business owners are able to make all of that money themselves then why do they have employees? Why waste MILLIONS of dollars a year on labor if you could simply make all of that money yourself? Also how do entire companies not collapse when managers go on vacation or sick leave? You seem to have not thought anything through. My stepdad owns a small steel business. He said they would have to close down the entire shop if they didn't have a fabricator, or didn't have an estimator. Wealth is not created by individuals, it is created by teams of people with unique skills who must all cooperate with each other. Even though managing is important it cannot yield any revenue without the labor of many other employees.

Lol

Of course wealth is created by "teams", but the most productive members of the teams arre the organizers and managers who direct the work of the others. The managers can't do it by themselves, but neither can the employees. And the efforts of the employers/managers are still in effect even when they're out sick or on vcation, right?

@@clarestucki5151 managers are also employees dimwit. all exploited by the owners.