Sorry for the late posting. I'm slow but not quite that slow. Have been out of touch since mid-weekend when my rural community hotspot went out of service. Only just got it back...
On 19/05/2012 1:39 PM, Shane Mage wrote: > On May 19, 2012, John Vertegaal wrote: >> >> Both you and I know that Conrad > The name is Conard, which has an..interesting...significance in > French > Chuckled, after looking it up. >> is spouting unadulterated BS. We also both know that to logically >> make a point we have to reason from axiomatic principles... > > Wrong. > You are right, inductive reasoning is valid too. But, to my understanding, it compromises attainable knowledge by making the field of investigation infinitely large. Since in terms of deductive axiomatic reasoning, everything within a particular field of investigation is deduced from its axioms, a boundary becomes drawn and those axioms themselves have to originate from exogeneity. When on the other hand one reasons from an explicit premise, a boundary around the subject field is forsaken and our economic situation would be a natural all encompassing and inevitable endogeneity into which we are born; whose true nature is unknowable and beyond our control. These two existential precepts are mutually exclusive. Logic commands an either/or, proposition. You can take your pick but you cannot have it both ways. Hence a coincidental Marxian view that the economy is a human-made system, implying a boundary, is out of the question. There is a lot more to all of this, but I got to break it off here for now. > To make a point logically (without the barbarism of splitting infinitives) > Thanks for the correction. > we have to reason from explicit premises. Only in mathematics are those premises >axiomatic. > Why "only"? I grant you of course that arithmetic and all higher forms of mathematics have to be axiomatically true before any matters measured mathematically can be deemed true. But I've never seen axioms defined this narrowly before. It seems to me to be a matter of semantics. > In regard to practical realities those premises (for Marxists and > other scientists as well as for the general run of humanity) are > always *a posteriori*, never *a priori*. > Indeed, premises always are whether axiomatic or explicit; but that isn't the point when "all things are made of numbers". While Pythagoras's doctrine as regarding the provisions of Nature is debatable, no such ambiguity exists when the _human provided_ economy is the subject of inquiry; as everything within it is valued *a priori* in terms of a unit of account. When *ex posteriori* these values have broken down due to a crash, the material presence of everything within is yet identical to before that crash and still has exactly the same potential to produce use-values. This means that an economy isn't part of Nature and that it has premises specific to its own nature as a whole and bounded system. So, in order to reason out economic crashes as to why changes in _account numbers_ (exchange-values) suddenly occurred, its premises have to be axiomatic for the same reason that the premises of the accounting discipline are axiomatic. > They are generalizations from experience and are always subject to > verification/refutation *in practice*. > As noted before, this isn't substantially different from my axioms, as these aren't a priori valid either and thus refutable too; the appearance of a single contradiction will do that. Verifiable however, only if an infinite period of time is explicitly acknowledged. > Marx said it all in the second Thesis on Feuerbach: "The question > whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a > question of theory but is a practical question." > Don't quite know what to make of this and wonder what Feuerbach's rejoinder would have been. Not having been schooled in philosophy (nor in economics truth be known) it seems to me that Marx, with the hubris common to all materialists, dismisses infinite regress. To me the objectivity of human knowledge in the here and now about the world we are born into is a myth. >> From my own set of them, capital rolls out to be a debt; and >> capitalization a societal to be resolved debt, that no amount of >> financial shenanigans can turn into a depletable positive entity... >> ...As I understand it, Marxians, just like (ueber) capitalists, >> axiomatically hold capital to be a depletable positive entity. > > Marxians, on the basis of the empirical generalization known as > historical materialism, view all modes of production as means of > distributing the labor power of society according to the uses valued > by the society. > Fair enough, apart from materialism as a way to reach absolute truth through science, I have no quarrel with this regarding an overall purpose from a meaningful subset of the human condition. But it says nothing about our current exchange-value economy being that subset and subject to crashes whereby it would become a null-set. Use-values aren't approachable arithmetically, with everything that this restriction implies; while every accounted-for mode of production within our subset economy is concerned with nothing but measurable exchange-values. > Capital is the specific expression (in the mode of production known > as capitalist) of a social relationship: domination by a ruling class > through the exploitation of labor to produce and accumulate > materialized surplus labor as surplus *value* (an empirical, not > axiomatic, category). > Surplus value materialized in the form of what? Use-values? What is its worth (or value) to its owners all by itself, i.e. in the absence of a return? And since returns are measured arithmetically, how can those have a relationship in terms of use-values to those owners? The explicit premise of a materialization into surplus value conflates the value of the thing with the thing itself. As I said some time ago, the map isn't the territory. N. Weiner (in the quotation below) exhibits the same confusion. > As surplus value accumulated in material form (the only form in > which surplus labor can be accumulated) > Is finance capital a material entity in your interpretation of Marx? > capitalized labor is continually being depleted (losing its > efficacity as means of exploitation of labor) both through material > wear and tear and through the formation by competitors of more > exploitatively effective capital objects. Every capitalist, private > or state, has continually to be concerned with such depletion at pain > of competitive ruin. This is a material fact and has nothing to do > with "axioms." > Let's examine your depletion scenario, looking plausible enough for scores of economists to fall for it, from my perspective. First, for labor to be capitalized a system of accounts is a prerequisite and such a system requires a unit of account. Expenditures are then made by capitalists before expected returns can come in, and for those returns to indeed occur, expenditures by other capitalists will have to be made. So in terms of the system of accounts, it's not any particular capital that engenders its own returns but instead only the capital of others can, but not necessarily do indeed, make those returns come about. The system works in a round-about way and it doesn't function in a straight line where the concept of "capitalized labor" has the causal property as envisaged by Marx. This doesn't mean that worker-owned means of production isn't valid, far from it; but what the above does imply is that the Marxian reasoning for it isn't. Capitalization of anything requires a system of accounts. Did Marx ever make that point, and if so how did he explain it? Supplant capitalist with worker/owner, and the logic of this short narrative remains entirely the same. At any level of development this system thus starts out with booked debits, negatives or to be resolved debts, that under equilibrium conditions will be nullified by incoming credits having a positive value. Total credits will potentially match total expended debits, but no surplus of the former over the latter is possible; unless more to be resolved debt is acquired financially, either for investment purposes into additional means of production making additional personal income available, or for direct spending in excess of current income. Under dynamic equilibrium conditions this additional acquisition of debt will need to be nullified; which can happen through economic growth (additional workforce), and by increased direct spending of financial income earners. If the latter doesn't (or cannot!) come about, the system disequilibrates permanently and a crash at some future point becomes inevitable. At _any_ level of remuneration, the costs of production (accounted-for personal incomes) cancel out in the aggregate. This axiomatically derived fact all by itself belies just about the entire subject of economics, from far left to far right interpretations. So, for the system as a whole, what determines profits and accumulation potential? First profits... With prices set at cost-plus levels, any "rate" (remember that no capital engenders its own!) of profit is achievable if capitalists were to spend their profit income directly. But this would rule out capital accumulation. So what is the latter in this scheme and how does it come about? As we all know, there is a massive amount of production facility in existence within our economy. It's on the books as being owned by someone and those owners would like to see a return, so prices are set to accommodate them. Owning something systemically, implies that the system owes. Although over the life of the capital the two are mirror images of each other, just like debit and credit are; at any point in time (in the words of economist Herman Daly following Frederick Soddy) capital "...is a hypothetical calculation of the present value of a permanent lien on the future real production of the economy"*. So the economy's accumulated capital is inanimate, and, as we saw above, entirely impotent to by itself effect the returns that are attributed to it. Each unit becomes created on account of the rest of society sharing its final output with the creators of the new capital, in the hope that its output will be sought after and thus provide returns; whereby it would remain integrally connected to the economy's system of accounts, sharing its derivative and now extra final output with those who previously sacrificed final output. Furthermore in a vertically integrated economy, with costs and profits being passed on down and assumed by lower levels, those returns in the aggregate and under equilibrium conditions can only become materialized through the direct spending on final output. Materialization in this scheme means crossing the economy's boundary, losing all economic connotation in exchange-values and turn into a reality having a use-value only, without seeking a monetary return. Note, as I've mentioned a number of time in the past, that this in no way prevents these items from returning to the economy. If that happens they would de-materialize, either momentarily, or when a (bank) loan gets involved, for a (much) longer time. The proceeds to the former owner, economic income, now assuming the systemic debt resolving means that is inherent in the personal income of the buyer. Money too isn't an asset in and of itself. So "your" money is far better characterized as the _economy's_ money. This entire analysis has been reasoned out from system-exogenous axioms where exchange-values and use-values have become mutually exclusive designations and there is no such thing as a "material fact". To summarize... When an economy reaches a level of sophistication where only double-entry accounting can keep track of all the goings on and designate value, materialized (physical) entities no longer fit the reality of being causal. We know that by bringing these means to the point of production, expenditures will have to be made; so all who are accounted for as its creators can be compensated, at which point the system is in debt to the extent of the made compensations. And when accounted for as owned and deserving a return which is embedded in the price of its output, the system is similarly in debt. In an exchange-value economy, capital equals debt, capital accumulation is accumulated (resolvable) debt, and fictitious capital is unresolvable debt. At no time is capital (nor for that matter, money) a depletable positive entity. Sure, a communist pure use-value economy (or society) is beyond all that. But the golden-age post-war period has shown that the cost-plus price system of free enterprise can be pretty efficient. Although times have changed and we can no longer rely on just growth to pull us out of the doldrums, there is plenty left to copy from that period; after which it would become a weigh-off of the pros and cons of both systems. All this is far too involved to tackle right now. But I'll close with the remark that there is no reason at all to identify free enterprise not only with dog-eats-dog capitalism, but even with more or less compassionate capitalism. The power of capital is vacuous. > > > Shane Mage > > "When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all > things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even > downright silly. > > When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that > all things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N. > Weiner) > Thanks for helping me out with this. ;) John V *)http://steadystate.org/capital-debt-and-alchemy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DalyNews+%28The+Daly+News%29 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
