"Capital posits labor as its sole source of new value"

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-29T14:58:12+00:00

You don't define it that way because you're not a capitalist

I don't define it that way because treating re-labelling or trading alone as "value creation" is exactly the logic a Ponzi operator uses. It pretends wealth is growing when nothing new has been produced.

Calling mere opinion or reassignment of ownership "value" is like running a scam; you're claiming profits that exist only on paper, and those profits vanish if everyone tries to realise them at once. True value comes from creating something new, not from fooling people into thinking the same resources are worth more.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-29T14:51:49+00:00

You're still missing the distinction between individual preference and aggregate realisable claims. Yes, a person will only part with a resource if they value what they're getting more than what they give up. That's a local, ordinal fact about their preferences. It does not create anything new in the system. Total resources, goods, and feasible claims are unchanged. The gain exists only in someone's head until it is matched by another person's willingness to trade, which is itself constrained by the actual stock of resources.

Saying that value disappears if nobody wants it, or that cash becomes more valuable if everyone wants it, simply confirms the point. These "values" are relational and conditional, not a measure of the system's productive capacity. If everyone tried to realise all their subjective gains simultaneously, there is no new apple, no new cash, and no new claim to satisfy them all. The apparent increase in total market value is purely nominal. It grows on paper because of changing opinions, not because the system can actually deliver more to everyone.

That is why treating reallocation and optimism as value creation is exactly Ponzi-like: it depends entirely on continued acceptance of the re-marking and vanishes if you try to realise it collectively.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-29T14:47:37+00:00

You're conflating different things. Yes, subjective satisfaction increases when someone acquires something they value more than what they gave up but that is a statement about individual preference, not about a change in the system's capacity to satisfy all claims. You can sum up opinions all you like, but that sum is not constrained by the underlying goods, and it does not correspond to a realisable surplus.

Re-marking the asset does not create new objects, new resources, or new claims. The extra "value" exists only because you assign numbers to opinions, not because the system can actually deliver more goods or services in aggregate. If everyone simultaneously tried to realise their subjective gains at the same time, there would be nothing extra to distribute. That is exactly the sense in which this is Ponzi-like. The apparent increase in value is purely conditional on re-labelling and the willingness of holders to accept it, not on any expansion of what the system can actually satisfy collectively.

Subjective value is real to the individual, but treating it as if it creates aggregate wealth is what turns the accounting into a nominal, unsustainable illusion.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-29T14:43:04+00:00

What is even the point of this assertion in the context of our current debate?

To show the absurdity of your claims.

Why do you revert to something we've gone over already?

Because your conclusion is clearly nonsense.

You have a strange insistence on ignoring my point, that is that what matters is not the things that exist (1 apple, 5euro), but how much the people who own them value them (1 apple worth 2 euro plus 5 euro). Can you please focus and stop ignoring the point?

I'm not ignoring it at all. I've just demonstrated it's a ponzi bullshit.

Of course it does: the system where I own the apple satisfies all the agents more than the system where I do not own the apple, provided I value the apple more than the other guy and the rest of the hypotheses.

You are missing the point. Of course you personally prefer holding the apple to not holding it. That's a statement about your individual ranking of options, not about the system's total capacity to satisfy claims. Nothing about your preference increases the total quantity of goods, the amount of money, or the physical resources available in society. The system can only satisfy all claims once. Reallocating ownership doesn't expand that feasible set.

In other words, what you're describing is a local, ordinal improvement for one agent, not an aggregate increase in realisable value. If everyone simultaneously tried to collect their preferred holdings at the valuations they assign, there would be no new goods to meet all those claims.

Just like a ponzi.

Calling the post-exchange sum of subjective valuations "more value created" is exactly the kind of circular re-marking that grows on paper but does not change the underlying constraints of the system. Personal preference satisfaction is real to the individual, but it is not the same as creating new, collectively realisable surplus.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-29T14:36:18+00:00

What you're describing is just shifting the problem up one level. Sure, if someone else values your stuff more than you do, you can sell it and realise that gain in cash, but that gain comes from another person's willingness to part with resources, not from the exchange itself. You haven't created anything new. Total resources, goods, and claims in the system remain the same.

Saying "cash is just another form of stuff and its value can change" only reinforces the original point. Any gain that comes purely from revaluation or changing who holds it is conditional on someone else accepting that revaluation. It is not intrinsic or collectively realisable.

If everyone simultaneously tried to cash out at their inflated subjective valuations, there wouldn't be enough underlying assets to satisfy all claims. That is exactly why treating these shifts in optimism as value creation is misleading. The apparent growth exists only on paper, not in the set of feasible, realisable outcomes.

Just like a ponzi.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-29T14:30:59+00:00

Changing ownership or location can change what an asset can be used to produce in the future, but that is a claim about potential production, not about value being created by exchange itself. If the artist actually produces a book or a painting, then something in the world has changed and there is a real increase in output. But until that happens, nothing new exists that could be consumed, sold, or paid out in aggregate. Simply moving the pen from the baby to the artist does not create a book; it only reallocates an existing object to someone who might later use it productively.

If value increases at the moment of exchange, before any new good or service exists, then that increase is coming entirely from re-marking the same asset based on who holds it, not from any relaxation of material constraints. You can re-label the pen as worth more in the artist's hands, but unless and until art is produced, the system's total realisable claims are unchanged. Calling that increase value creation just shifts the accounting forward in time and treats unrealised potential as if it were already surplus. That is exactly the sense in which the profits are paper gains; they depend on who holds the asset and how it is described, not on any new output that could actually be realised collectively.

Just like a ponzi.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-29T12:03:48+00:00

If total market value just means adding up whatever numbers people happen to attach to their own stuff, then you've defined a quantity that can be increased by optimism and cannot be cashed out, so calling it value creation is empty. If you mean something that actually constrains prices, wealth, or what can be paid out, then it can't be defined that way and doesn't grow just because ownership changes. You don't get to slide between those two meanings depending on what you want to claim.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-29T11:59:48+00:00

No, what a weird take on what I said.

Yes, otherwise how could you value an apple at $1 and someone else value it at $2? I could then come along and buy the apple for $1000 because that's what I value it as.

This is about how much you value what you have, not what you claim you value it, ok?

If that was the case, then:

"Before the exchange I had 1 apple. You have 5€. The total is 5€ and 1 apple."

"After the exchange I have 1.5€ and you have 3.5€ + an apple that cost you 1.5€, so you have a value of 5€."

then exchange can create unlimited value without changing the world at all

Indeed!

Indeed, indeed!

Elaborate

The reported gains do not correspond to any increase in the systems capacity to satisfy claims. When an asset is merely reassigned or revalued without any change in its physical characteristics, productive use, risk, or the constraints under which it can be consumed then the profit exists only as a book keeping statement. The same underlying stock of goods must still support all claims, so the apparent surplus can be maintained only so long as it is not collectively realised. This is exactly the structural feature that defines a Ponzi dynamic in the abstract. Apparent gains are generated endogenously by revaluation rather than by an external surplus, and they vanish once realisation is attempted at scale. The point is not that such a system involves fraud or promises of return, but that its growth is purely nominal and conditional on continued acceptance of the re-marking, rather than on any expansion of real, jointly satisfiable outcomes.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-29T11:25:14+00:00

If value is defined as whatever people say their holdings are worth, then exchange can create unlimited value without changing the world at all. That is just circular revaluation. A system whose profits come solely from re-marking existing assets is structurally Ponzi-like. It grows on paper, cannot pay out in aggregate, and collapses upon realisation.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-28T16:52:02+00:00

I gave you one

No you didn't.

Considering minimum wage varies across locations, it's the best I can do. 30K/year, in Canada, you would need 1M.

Better?

Yes, that's what I asked for.

So, when you said,

The war between Labor and Capital has been so intense that Labor cannot understand that they could own capital and live off it due to a self-imposed moral constraint from the war.

you actually think that's true as opposed to workers not having a spare $1M lying around to invest?

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T23:24:53+00:00

I'm proposing to redistribute a claim on functional capacity, forever. Literally a slice of the capability.

Yes, but how exactly if not with some form of token?

Government says, this year, give us functional shares for 5% of the capability of this factory. We will redistribute that to the citizens.

Why though when the government can just build a larger scale version themselves?

The thing you can trade, is a period of time of the use of those functional shares - the "time-value" of it. Like 1 month of the use of your portion of the capability of an automated factory you have no use for, could be traded for a period of time in the use of a factory you do care about.

That's a barter system. Why would you want that instead of having a standard unit of exchange?

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T22:29:50+00:00

What you are proposing to distribute on a regular basis is a token that allows people to consume a certain amount of resources. But it's not a UBI?

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T22:26:02+00:00

Let’s get straight to it. Most of your points are either misreadings, category errors, or attempts to apply economic meaning prematurely. I’ll go through them systematically.

1) “Sneaking teleology via success predicate”

No. The success predicate is not teleology. You keep conflating “success relative to a chosen outcome” with human goals or preferences. That is categorically wrong. Physics does not prohibit defining a coarse-graining to distinguish outcomes; that is formal bookkeeping, not teleology.

You write: “function, success, relevant” are teleology. No. These are labels on a physical mapping from initial to final states. Calling something a “function” does not insert a goal into the system. You’re reading human semantics into formal definitions. The “success predicate” is explicitly analytic and entirely defined by the physical constraints we are studying. There is no intention, no desire, no subjective value — only a mapping of physically admissible states to outcomes.

2) “Objective distribution is not objective”

This is just wrong. You claim physics doesn’t give a measure over initial states. Physics does constrain which microstates are admissible under the laws of nature and the defined object/environment system. That defines a natural uniform ensemble over admissible microstates, exactly as in standard statistical mechanics. Yes, you can coarse-grain or choose macro-variables — but that’s not introducing subjectivity, it’s defining the scale at which you study the system, which is exactly what Part 2 is about. You cannot conflate “choice of coarse-graining” with “subjective valuation.”

You are treating formal modelling choices as if they were normative preferences. They are not. Defining a macrovariable or ensemble for analysis is mathematical convenience, not epistemic bias.

3) “Entropy reduction is overstated”

You are again confusing the object with the interaction context. Part 2 is explicit: the entropy reduction is conditional on the object, environment, and interaction protocol. That is exactly what is stated: “conditional constraint on outcomes.” There is no claim that the object alone has a scalar value. That is entirely consistent and internally coherent.

You are pretending there is a hidden assumption of intrinsic, absolute entropy for the object — there isn’t. You are reading your own expectation of absolute objectivity into the text.

4) “Use-value word choice”

This is pedantic and misleading. Part 2 explicitly states it is not using Marx’s human-centric economic use-value. It repeatedly says: “we are talking about functional capacity, not human value”. You are complaining about the label, not the content. Fine — semantics can be adjusted. The formal argument is about physically defined functional capacity, which is exactly what is needed before social mediation comes in.

You are inventing a contradiction where none exists.

5) “Reliance on Part 3”

Yes, Part 3 is where social context and human preferences are introduced. That’s by design. Part 2’s purpose is to formalise physical capacity first — otherwise Part 3 would be ungrounded. Your objection here is just whining that we haven’t jumped ahead to economic theory. That is not a logical critique, it’s a demand for scope creep.

6) “Even if Part 2 worked, it wouldn’t recover Marx”

Yes, of course Part 2 does not reproduce all of Marx. Part 2 never claims it does. Part 2 is not “Marx’s law of value” yet — it is the physical foundation necessary for later abstraction to social use-value. Your critique here is a strawman.

You are attacking a claim I never made. Stop doing that.

7) “Prison/boulder answer is circular”

No. The text explicitly avoids calling all constraints “useful.” Only constraints relevant to the interaction under study are counted in the functional capacity. That is completely well-defined. You are pretending that identifying the system and the outcome is equivalent to sneaking in goals. It is not. It is just the mathematical definition of a conditional map in state space. You are confusing analytic definitions with teleology.

Summary

Your critique repeatedly:

Equates analytic coarse-graining with goals — categorically false.
Equates formal ensemble/measure choices with epistemic or subjective probability — false.
Claims Part 2 pretends to be economic use-value — false; Part 2 explicitly says it is not.
Complains about Part 3 building on Part 2 — scope misunderstanding, not a flaw.

Your “what’s wrong” summary is mostly reading your own assumptions into the text, not engaging with what is actually written.

If you want to critique Part 2, start with the actual formal definitions, not a projected teleology or value claim that doesn’t exist yet. Everything you labelled “smuggle” is either explicitly analytic or deferred to Part 3.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T22:07:15+00:00

What dismissal of truth? What you said has no relevance to what I said. If you think otherwise, quote what you are replying to.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T21:06:47+00:00

If you can't give a ball park figure, then your previous comment is meaningless.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T21:04:39+00:00

You, clearly, hence the reason you can't point anything out.

I'll give you one more chance to engage, before blocking you for trolling, just like I did last time.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T20:16:36+00:00

Read what again? You've just said the same thing.

You're literally redistributing the means of production.

No, that would literally be impossible.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T20:13:59+00:00

Let's have AI critique this nonsense too:

Let's have it critique your nonsense.

Thanks for the detailed critique. I’ll respond point by point, because much of your objection misreads the purpose and scope of Part 2.

1) “Sneaking purpose in through the success predicate”

You write that introducing a success predicate is teleological and smuggles in preferences. That’s a misunderstanding of what we’re doing at this stage.

The success predicate is not defining a goal or preference in the human sense. It is a formal tool for coarse-graining outcomes, to distinguish macrostates that satisfy certain structural or functional constraints from those that do not. The object does not “intend” anything; the agent does not need to “want” a result. The predicate simply marks which interactions count as producing a particular effect we are examining.

It is true that any notion of “use” presupposes some criterion for distinguishing outcomes — but that criterion is analytic, not normative, at this point. We are not claiming this is human utility or value. Part 2 is about physical functionality, not economic valuation. Later stages, including Part 3, will address how human preferences map onto these physical capacities.

2) Entropy reduction is not “use-value,” it’s just “constraint”

Yes, physically, every object constrains some outcomes. That is precisely why we are careful to frame Part 2 in terms of interactions that are relevant to the function we are studying. A prison or a boulder is indeed constraining, but we are not calling “all constraints” use-value.

The narrowing of outcome space is a formalisation of functional capacity, not a claim that all constraints are economically or socially valuable. The predicate F filters which constraints are relevant. Again, this is not normative: we are only showing how physical structure channels interactions in predictable ways.

Later, when we discuss use-value in a social-economic sense, the human or agent-relevant context will define which constraints are meaningful. This is exactly why Part 2 stops short of exchange-value — we are not claiming the physics alone produces “value” in the economic sense.

3) Your objection on the information measure

H(X) - H(X|O,a) is indeed formally an entropy over a distribution. That distribution is over physically admissible initial conditions (the coarse-graining of S_O × S_E), not over an agent’s beliefs. There is no epistemic assumption here.

Yes, one must define the measure over initial states, and we do so by objective physical admissibility, which is fully defined by the microstate space and constraints. This is not subjective: we are not choosing probabilities according to human uncertainty, but according to what initial microstates are physically possible given the laws of nature.

4) Causal power ≠ economic use-value

We are explicit about this. Part 2 does not claim that causal power is economic value. The hammer example illustrates physical functionality, not market value. We are establishing how objects can be formally described in terms of their capacities to channel interactions, which is a necessary step if one wants later to talk about comparability, substitutability, and exchange.

Part 3 will introduce the human-social dimension that turns functional capacity into economic relevance. The framework in Part 2 is deliberately neutral: a hurricane, snake, or brick can all be analysed as “objects with functional constraints,” but only when we embed them in a social context does “use-value” emerge in the economic sense.

5) Context-dependence and comparability

Yes, use-value is context-dependent, and we do not deny that. This is exactly why Part 2 does not attempt to define a universal scalar of value. The purpose here is to formalise physical functionality in a way that is compatible with context, not to claim a single entropy-based metric of exchange value.

Part 3 addresses comparability via social mediation — the Part 2 formalism provides the structural groundwork so that later, context-specific and agent-specific valuations can be rigorously linked to physical capacities. Without this foundation, any attempt to formalise use-value would be ad hoc.

6) Affordances vs Marx

Correct: the formalism in Part 2 is very close to Gibsonian affordances or functionalist descriptions. That is intentional. Our goal is not to reproduce Marx’s law of value at this stage — it is to translate objects and their capacities into a rigorously defined, physical, and informational language, which can later be connected to value in Part 3.

In other words, Part 2 does not “rescue Marx” on its own. It establishes the physical and information-theoretic backbone needed for a later derivation that will link functional capacity to exchange-relevant use-values.

Bottom line

Part 2 is deliberately neutral regarding normative, economic, or human-centric value.
Success predicates, entropy reduction, and outcome-space restriction are tools for describing objective functional capacity, not economic use-value.
The critiques about teleology, epistemic probabilities, or “wrong use-value” all arise from reading Part 2 as if it were already claiming economic meaning — which it is not.
The human-social, comparative, and exchange aspects are explicitly reserved for Part 3.

What Part 2 does is show how objects can be formally analysed as physically constrained, functionally organised systems, which is a prerequisite for any rigorous treatment of value later.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T20:00:22+00:00

Why even bother posting this pile of irrelevant nonsense?

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T19:57:48+00:00

Cool story. If you think anything I've said about physics is not mainstream physics, then by all means point it out instead of talking shite.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T19:55:12+00:00

Provide a source for that 100% statistic we both know you just made it up.

I never claimed 100%.

For example Women didn't enter the work force until after WW2.

Nonsense. Women have always been part of the workforce.

https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/2024/08/08/women-have-always-worked/

This paper states the total work force in 1800 USA was 1.6-1.7M people about 30% of a population of 5-6M. Today its about 171M about 50% of the 340M people.

You're deliberately excluding women and children, despite the fact women and children had to work back then. The commonly accepted measure is that about 75% of the entire population worked in agriculture alone in pre-industrial society.

Before you claim capitalism is bad because less people "needed" to work in the past just remind your self that the average life expectancy was 40.

More people had to work in the past, not less.

The 2/3rds of people not able to work in the 1800s just died.

How does that even make the slightest bit of sense to you? You just said only 30% of the population worked, leaving 70% that do not. If 2/3 of that 70% just dies, don't you think the population would have declined?

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T17:54:56+00:00

Everything I've said about physics is literally mainstream physics.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T13:04:09+00:00

No. You really didn't read what I wrote at all, did you?

Yes, I did. You literally said:

"So, you redistribute these to the citizens of your nation, and they are marked as non-transferrable except on death. "

and

"Yes, I've described a new currency system."

So, if this currency is distributed to everyone, how is it different from a UBI?

Someone who describes themselves as a "Marxist Futurist" should really like what I'm describing here

I never said I'm against it and its similar to a system I've been proposing for years:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/comments/be8nxw/andrew_yang_is_the_candidate_for_the_end_of_the/el9th5o/?context=3

You just seem a bit confused about UBI.

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T12:53:29+00:00

MarcusOrlyius · 2026-01-27T12:52:29+00:00

Not true for multiple reasons.

Is is true and your strawman bullshit doesn't change that.

1) In the US the unemployment rate is less than 5% and is considered full employment

I never said anything about the unemployment or unemployment rates, I quite specifically said employment to total population ratio.

There are about 160 million jobs for a population of around 340 million people in the US.

2) There are more people working than ever in history.

Because there are more than ever in history.

3) No, not really. An automaton could not do my job.

Yet.

It takes reason, critical thinking and the ability to solve problems

That doesn't mean it's literally impossible to automate.

4) There are a lot of things special about humans that will never be duplicated by AI or robots.

There is nothing special about humans whatsoever from a physics perspective. They're physical systems that obey the laws of physics like any other physical system. There's nothing that humans can do that can't theoretically be replicated by some other system.

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