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Ocean Book
Sep 27, 2010

:yum: - hi
but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

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Al Cowens
Aug 11, 2004

by WE B Bourgeois
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byOw4AYd7-8

Enfield
May 30, 2011

by Nyc_Tattoo

Enfield fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Jul 30, 2015

Enfield
May 30, 2011

by Nyc_Tattoo

holy moly

extra stout
Feb 24, 2005

ISILDUR's ERR

Ocean Book posted:

but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

he seemed much more wise and even more depressed than his brother groucho

Roy
Sep 24, 2007
yep men sure are better than women

*smokes cigar while laughing heartily in leather chair placed comfortably in the middle of wood-panelled reading room*

Ocean Book
Sep 27, 2010

:yum: - hi
Welcome to Subjectivist Island. Here lives Eugene, our happy island barbarian. Everyday Eugene makes choices. He decides to spend his time building his teepee, catching fish, or practicing his backstroke. He likes the backstroke most of all, but after so many laps around the island he gets tired of it and starts to prefer catching fish or teepee building. Intent on maximizing his utility, Eugene gets out some paper and a pencil and makes himself a preference scale so that he can figure out the exact proportions to devote to all 3 activities each day. He cherishes this preference scale because it is the source of his freedom. It’s just like the preference scale you carry around in your pocket everyday….. you carry one don’t you? (2)

Ok, now setting aside the fact that most of us don’t carry around a preference scale in our pockets, there is a bigger problem: Subjectivists want you to believe that this little story about Eugene and Subjectivist Island is all that you need to know in order to understand the functioning of modern capitalist society. Funny then, that we had to abstract away all of capitalism, all society in fact, in order to arrive at our theory of preferences. Were we to think critically we might begin to suspect that there is something fishy going on with this abstraction. That fishy something is the stink of an ideological abstraction. We discussed such ideological abstractions in the last video, Law of Value 7, but let’s review a few points here.

The point of a dominant ideology is to make it seem like the present order of things is a universal order; that the status quo is the natural expression of things, unchangeable. How convenient then, for our bourgeois theorists, that our natural, universal man, Eugene, happens to contain the seed of modern capitalist society in all of his preferenc-ing and acting. It’s as if every choice made by every human since the dawn of time was just an expression of innate capitalist instincts, waiting to come into being in our modern society.
But it’s not enough just to point out the obvious ideological basis of subjectivist theory. We must also prove that this ideological abstraction is illegitimate. Let’s do that. It should only take a few minutes.

The parable of Subjectivist Island leads one to think that human desires are formed privately, independent of society. But this has never been the case. Desires are taught, socially constructed, and can’t be understood independently of society. How do subjectivists respond? They say “Yes desires may be constructed but this is out of the scope of economics so we don’t have to consider it.” In fact, this is how modern economics deals with all criticism- it ignores it and says it’s the topic of another discipline. How convenient! It’s like saying that we don’t have to consider the fact that the earth is round because that’s beyond the scope of flat-earth theory.

We can’t understand desire without also understanding the ways in which we go about attaining our desires. Here’s where the abstraction of Subjectivist Island breaks down. On the island Eugene attains his desires by directly acting to get the things he wants. But these are not the sort of choices we make in a capitalist society. In capitalism we have to sell our labor to someone else so we can make a wage that we can then spend on the things we want, but only after we’ve given most of our wage to the landlord, the mortgage company and the state. Subjective value theory has to prove that it can move this abstract model of choice from Subjectivist Island to a full-scale capitalist economy. It does this through the fantasy of barter.

Let’s say Eugene, while back-stroking one day, discovers another island called Barter Island. Here lives Ludwig who cracks coconut all day. They decide to trade fish and coconuts, each one carefully measuring their utilities for fish and coconuts on their preference scales, calculating the precise exchange ratios to maximize their utilities, resulting in an exchange ratio between coconuts and fish. “Now,” says the subjectivist, “we have shown that our abstraction was legit and that we can explain exchange ratios purely through the science of preference scales.” If only it were that simple.

The first thing we might notice is that the exchanges on Barter Island can only take place because Eugene and Ludwig have different resource endowments. If they both had access to coconut and fish then there would be no reason to trade. In order for trade to continue in a sustained way, trade must reproduce these differences.
This means that in order for a capitalist market to work there must be the constant reproduction of a certain type of property relations in which people have to enter the market in order to get what they need to live. Specifically people must be deprived of their own means of production, forced to enter the market to sell their labor in order to buy the things they need. This property relation must be continually reproduced through exchange so that there is always scarcity and people are always dependent on the market.

Thus, we can see that something very sneaky has been done. Hmmm… what is it? We were trying to form a theory of barter based solely on subjective preferences when all the sudden we realized we needed to assume a certain type of property relation in order to make any sense of it. Thus, abstracting away property relations and forming a theory of exchange without them is impossible and illegitimate.

Even more damning is the fact that capitalist societies don’t have anything to do with barter. People don’t produce to directly exchange products for other products. We produce in order to exchange things for money. Money is an intermediary in all economic activity. So it makes no sense to say we measure our subjective utility for coconuts against fish when exchanging. We measure everything against money. When you are in the supermarket calculating your preference scales with the Preference App on your iPhone you aren’t just considering your preferences for fish and coconuts in the abstract, as if on a desert island. You are also considering the market prices of these commodities. This market price already exists before you make your subjective value judgements.

But this is problematic. Subjective valuations were supposed to explain price, but now we have to assume the prior existence of prices in order to explain subjective value judgements. It seems we are stuck in a big messy circle.

And if we are exchanging everything for money then we must have a utility for money right? But money has no direct utility. It’s not even good for blowing your nose on. The value of money is what it will buy. And this is not set by our preferences but instead reflects the relation of money to all other commodities, reflecting the vast interpenetration of millions of markets all over the world. There is no such thing as a personal utility for money because money’s value is already established by forces beyond our control. (3)

And there are more difficulties presented to subjective value theory by the presence of money. On Barter Island Eugene and Ludwig had direct knowledge of what they were getting from each exchange. But in our world we don’t know exactly how much everything is going to exchange for ahead of time. When we sell a product in the market we don’t know exactly what products we will be able to buy with that income. There is a high degree of uncertainty. But with so much uncertainty how are we ever to form those nice, rational preference scales where we’ve perfectly calculated the exact utility relations of all commodities to each other? Well, we can’t! (4)

It seems that every time we try to abstract away property relations and production relations they end up sneaking back into the picture. This is because it is absolutely illegitimate to try to explain capitalism without a theory of the social relations between people as they actively produce the world they live in.

Applewhite
Aug 16, 2014

by vyelkin
Nap Ghost
This is Boris. He lives on communist island. You can tell because the island is a nightmarish prison where he labors all day with a gun to the back of his head. Boris is executed later that day for wondering out loud if maybe the promises of Communism are lies. The end of Boris and also millions of other inhabitants of Communist Island.

corpuscollossus
Apr 19, 2007

bronzebros get physical

basement jihadist
Oct 3, 2002

ugh i cant find that .gif of the dude snorting cocaine off his own cock but i post that

Decebal
Jan 6, 2010

Ocean Book posted:

but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women

http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Men-Rise-Women/dp/B00D9TA4VY

Archer666
Dec 27, 2008
I make history, one gay sex at the time

FlimFlam Imam
Mar 1, 2007

Standing on a hill in my mountain of dreams

Ocean Book posted:

but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

And thus doomed to repeat it. Right?

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basement jihadist
Oct 3, 2002

"History shows again and again. How nature points out the folly of men." - zizek

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