Forward, comrade!
“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.”
Doesn’t labor measure commodities, and isn’t it an average taking into account all labor in society – not just the value of this particular productive act, i.e., cutting hair?
Yes, the value of commodities is the average social labor expended to produce it and the price tend towards the value. Marx mentions both the amount of labor as well as the time it takes to produce anything:
What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production. The individual commodity counts here only as an average sample of its kind. Commodities which contain equal quantities of labour, or which can be produced in the same time, have therefore the same value. The value of a commodity is related to the value of any other commodity as the labour-time necessary for the production of the one is related to the labour-time necessary for the production of the other. ‘As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time,’
Notice how Marx uses the “labour-time” category. Individual labor is essentially time expended by a worker to accomplish a certain task. In the case of production of commodities, the value of those commodities tend towards the socially necessary labor-time to produce it. In the perspective of the bourgeoisie, the worker wages are merely costs of production, and the competition between other companies pressure towards producing commodities close to their cost of production. In fact, it has been proven that prices really do tend towards the cost of production or the socially average labor necessary to produce anything.
Now what about the worker wages, which is the variable capital? In the case of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie always try their best to cut the costs of their companies to increase their profits, they have the necessity to cut on worker wages, because there’s always a limit to how you can cut from constant capital. However, the bourgeois cannot cut wages for long. Because if the wages are low enough, a worker cannot sustain themselves, either by debt, hunger, homelessness, health issues or quitting to find something that can sustain them. Even in modern slavery, when workers are in captivity, there exists the costs of maintaining the slaves enough to continue working.
So the cost of getting a haircut, while not related to the productive sphere of capital, is still bound by the fact that this job should earn a worker enough so they can continue living.
The water-in-the-desert example relates to productivity, which describes the the amount of labor which must be expended to extract or produce a commodity. Since water is hard to get in the desert – one must either dig deep for it, or have tankers bring it in – the bucket of water has a high labor-value.
This is another perspective to this question, and you are correct as well.
To the other parts of your comment, I don’t immediately understand what was your point, but I agree with your views nonetheless.
I believe so, too. When current president Ivan Duque said they would make a “harmonious, institutional and transparent transition” it was very apparent to me that the Petro government wouldn’t present any rupture from the bourgeois order.
I’m new to economics but Hakim has a great video about this very topic you should definitely check it out, youre gonna like it
I’ve seen it comrade, and Hakim’s work is much more coherent and scientific than Viki1999’s, which is almost purely liberal ideology
He wasn’t just a Reddit user, eventually BayArea415 had established a community around him on Discord, YouTube and Twitter. Then, he said he had to shut it off because of death threats and harassment towards his family.
I think that was a very bad call. By becoming public, his case would receive more notoriety and by returning to anonimity, BayArea415 then became actually more defenseless and quickly unknown again. I honestly believe that he was murdered or arrested, or something, but I have no evidence for his existing or non-existing.
In late 2020, he had about 1.2 million karma and had been an user since 2012 on Reddit. Right now, his account was deleted. I have learned through this event that anonimity may actually make us an easier target.
Hey comrade, thanks for contacting us here. I have checked on all ProleWiki languages (our account requesting is not centralized, unfortunately), and didn’t find your name on the recruitment section. But I did find an username named Nyoomie, and in fact I approved your request myself on 12 June hehe
Can you get into your account? It says here that your email is ***omDe****@pm.me
. Checking into our mail logs it says here “Recipient address rejected: Address does not exist”. If you typed your email wrong, you can contact me here on Lemmygrad and I’ll send you a temporary password so you can log in, change it, and change your email address to a valid one if that’s case
The referred article on “Science and Technology Daily” did not get removed, instead, Bloomberg actually redirects to “http://www.stdaily.com/index/error/error.shtml”. It’s perhaps intended to make an user think like China deleted it
Depends on what movie I’m watching