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If you don’t believe me, go to the original source: read Menger, Bohm-Bewark, and their intellectual heirs.
No. Frankly, I have a life to service. If you can't summarise convincingly, you don't understand your material anyway.
No sales, no profit, no value.
Again untrue, unless you are prepared to assert that all human interaction is a sale.
Buyers and sellers do not have perfect information and do not always act rationally (see Stiglitz's Nobel work); market valuation in practice is flawed.
This is a red herring and not relevant to Marx.
It isn't a red herring, it's a problem for you and for Marx. If you can solve it for the both of you, that's great.
Stiglitz and I have entirely different notions of rational.
That's quite apparent. He, on the other hand, used to run one of the largest financial institutions in the world, re-assembled shattered economies, and has a Nobel prize. Is your experience comparable?
He is effectively telling people what is in their own best interest.
Something which is, sadly, sometimes necessary. Oh, and by the way, so are you.
I’m saying all purposeful human action is by definition rational
The field of psychology is against you in this. Empirical research is distinctly not in your favour. If you want to re-define 'rational', go ahead, but all it means is that we need another word to talk about what 'rational' usually means.
ALL VALUE IS SUBJECTIVE.
It doesn't make it truer when you put it in capitals, you know that, right?
I disagree. Are you familiar with the concept of intersubjectivity in ethics? It's relevant here. And actually, as I mentioned before, the notion that we are individuals is flawed; we're defined by our interactions with others. Leave someone alone on an island and he or she starts to get a bit weird. Leave a small group alone and their use of language shifts and finally you get a dialect, and so on; we use one another to check ourselves and see our behaviours. Value is arrived at corporately - but also, some things, such as the biosphere, have objective value to everyone alive. If people don't think about those things, they won't act on that reality - and people are very good at narrow focus - but that doesn't reduce the actual value, only the sale valuation.
Mainstream calls the mechanism “internalizing negative externalities”
Speak English, please. I don't see how this remedies the 'tragedy of the commons':
No one else can own the air you breathe. You have homesteaded the particular air you breathe. Note that you cannot homestead or own ALL the air.
In which case who owns the rest of it? There's more air than we are collectively breathing at any given time. Is it held in Air Escrow? Is it owned by corporations or governments? If so, we return to my question about by what right. If not, then the tragedy of the commons returns to haunt you.
Try building an economy on junk mail comrade.
Listen up, Benito, if you want to continue this discussion, you can ditch the humourous 'Comrade' shit. Apart from anything else, the notion that I'm a Communist is only slightly less laughable than Wayne Sleep contesting the Heavyweight Boxing title.
Without prices, you cannot make even simple economic decisions, because you cannot compare alternatives or make any sort of economic calculations.
Without a market doesn't necessarily mean without cost-awareness.
The economic calculation problem is why Marxism is so wrong, and so dangerous, and will never work
As I said to you before, it's entirely possible that the most important part of Marx's work is not his economics per se. However, I simply don't find you persuasive. You keep saying that such and such is the case or such and such happens, but while you put the bits you feel strongly about in bold or capitals, they remain statements based on assertions you seem unable on unwilling to back up.
So you will never be able to build up an elaborate, intricate, roundabout structure of production that is the hallmark of a society with a high standard of living (and can only occur under the price system, which can only occur under private property).
All this, for example, is based on claims you have made which remain unproven. It is, of course, hell to prove a negative, but still.
Instead of listening to what I am saying, you are projecting what you have read about economics elsewhere onto my arguments.
Since you refuse to supply your own references in anything other general references to a body of work a lifetime in the making, I have little choice but to attempt to understand what you say in the context of what I already know and have access to.
This is clouding your understanding. E.g., statistics, perfectly rational, full information, intrinsic value, etc. You’ll note that I mentioned none of those. I don’t agree with the economists who throw those terms around, or their methodology.
No, I brought these things into the discussion because they appeared relevant. Some of them are.
Nobel Prize Winner Friedrich Hayek (the only econ nobel laureate I even vaguely agree with)
You don't find it significant that the people at the top of the field we're discussing hold views markedly different from your own? Interesting.
showed why in practice, the worst rise to the top under Marxist type systems in the Road to Serfdom (i.e., the revolution is always betrayed, or the revolution was only paying lip service to Marx to begin with).
There are strong social and structural reasons why it happens; as I said before, I think there are problems with any economic system as a means to social justice, because finally it seems to me that the utopian versions of these systems are the product of societal evolution and not the road to it. However, it's also interesting to ask whether the worst are in some way kept down by the capitalist system? I haven't seen any signs of it.
Subjective value is uncomplicated as well but you still haven’t managed to grasp it it.
I understand your position and I think it is wrong. I believe it is philosophically and scientifically untennable.
I’m striving to talk to your level
Glass of grown-up juice for my friend, please.
Cute. I don’t disagree with any of that (except maybe the “predicated” part, if you are trying to slip some reference to a nonexistant class struggle into the equation).
Okay, 'cute'? Not an acceptable response in argument.
Now, as to 'predicated', it has no particular Marxian aspect. Feel free to look it up via the link if you're not sure what it means.
ONLY INDIVIDUALS CAN ACT. ONLY INDIVIDUALS CAN PLACE VALUES ON THING.
Actually, as I said above, that's not the case. Individuals are to some measure composites anyway, but also their references are other individuals. Without reference to each other, we cannot retain language or perceptions of aesthetics, our notion of value will fluctuate wildly from moment to moment. So while at any given moment the valuation will be a true representation of desire - up to a point - it won't be a statement of value you could use in any economic calculation, which I believe was the test you applied to Marxian planning.
In other words, valuation is a consensus activity.
the INDIVIDUAL acting based on his own personal subjective valuations. And by doing so, on a free market, he magically improves the standard of living of the entire social web! Without even trying to or being conscious of it! So much for alienation under capitalism!
Er... no.
This psychological alienation business is a canard.
It's really not. The root of Marx's notion that alienation is bad is his contention that human identity is contingent upon the fact that we are makers of things, and that the co-opting of this basic trait under capitalism was a violation of that core identity. This concept of self-alienation is not hard to find in Marx's writings. For your edification:
Since alienated labour: (1) alienates nature from man; and (2) alienates man from himself, from his own active function, his life activity; so it alienates him from the species. ... For labour, life activity, productive life, now appear to man only as means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to maintain physical existence. ... In the type of life activity resides the whole character of a species, its species-character; and free, conscious activity is the species-character of human beings. ... Conscious life activity distinguishes man from the life activity of animals. (Manuscripts, p. 16).
(You also misrepresent the economic version; part of the issue is that the worker sells his labour time rather than his product. He has no stake in the thing, only in subsistence living. For Marx, this is forced labour; no free exchange of goods is possible under this system, because one side is coerced by necessity.) |
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