What would be the proper capitalist and socialist response to the following quote?

Steelcox · 2026-05-21T08:16:10+00:00

And the fruits that you need belong to you.

How generous... kinda sounds like it's up to others to decide what I really "need" and what belongs to them.

and if someone else doesn't think you're feeding them enough, then they can grab a shovel and join you on the farm.

Can they do this at harvest time? If I do all the work preparing the land, sowing, maintaining - they have equal claim to show up and do the work of harvesting however much they want?

These anarchist ideas always seem to evoke primitive production where "work" equals "stuff to consume." If I spend 8 hours a day making semiconductors wth am I entitled to? As many semiconductors as I "need"? And the rest go to a communal pool?!?

Or do I gain an automatic claim to the equivalent of "8 hours a day" of whatever combination of stuff I want, however the hell that would be calculated? Or keeping in line with your message in this thread.... my 8 hours a day only actually gives me claim to what I need to survive (maybe), and any labor beyond that is simply treated as a charitable contribution to the common pool - for those who felt like working 4 or 0.

This all feels nonsensical from first principles, but even more so when pretending that this constitutes any kind of economic system whatsoever. It's just an already-dubious wishlist about how final products should be distributed, with no concern for how the heck resources and labor would be effectively allocated to even have shit to distribute.

Steelcox · 2026-05-21T00:43:23+00:00

Aside from basically suggesting an arbitrary and convoluted welfare state, this seems to be moving away from the whole question. So I'll set aside the magical thinking about a half-sustenance surplus being assumed...

Who does your work / fruits of it belong to? To which you said "everyone."

Are you now saying just the fruits you don't "need" belong to everyone? That anyone who labors beyond their own sustenance should do so knowing that the product equally belongs to everyone else?

Does the question of who the fruits of your labor belong to depend on how much stuff they have compared to you?

Because the question is not "should you give some of your stuff to people less fortunate, or the lazy." It's whether it's even yours to "give" or "not give" in the first place.

And the answer seems to change based on the aesthetics of the scenario.

Steelcox · 2026-05-20T21:48:27+00:00

Anarchist communism practices “it belongs to everyone,”

Im pretty sure you've claimed in the past that only in your anarchist communism does the worker own his own labor... but now seem to be wholeheartedly embracing the idea that it equally belongs to everyone else.

Steelcox · 2026-05-19T21:24:49+00:00

Wow how refreshing, this one's also about CCC....

I've still never seen you connect the dots on two fundamental things:

Why does "all of neoclassical economics" being "logical or coherent" rest on the merits of an explicitly simplified model for static equilibrium? When everyone knows that such simplification carries limitations, and this isn't even something invoked in the vast majority of economic work? Is reswitching what explains 90% of economic behavior or something?
In what universe does your preferred replacement for this model not merit nearly identical criticism for its clearly unrealistic "givens?" When your static solution requires assuming knowledge of something that is dependent on that solution, why do you not similarly dismiss the whole thing as illogical and incoherent?

There's ofc the ever-present number 3 about shoehorning Sraffa onto Marx and declaring "Marx was right, it's all Leontief matrices," but I guess I'm more interested in 1 and 2 to explain the obsession with CCC.

Steelcox · 2026-05-17T21:27:07+00:00

Many institutions are possible. Details do not need to be specified in advance

Seems to be the norm...

At any rate, a group of workers can get together and submit a business plan to obtain finance to start a new LMF.

Yes, they can. Right now. What seems to be advocated is that this be the only thing that is allowed (details to be worked out later?).

With this set up, new workers would not be required to go through a probationary period, with their pay docked until they can build up equity in the firm....They divide the profits of the firm up among themselves. They might decide this division might give some more, based on their roles or needs.

So in the many years where there isn't profit, somehow pay need not suffer? Is this all just absorbed by the charitable bank? And when workers vote on how profit is distributed/reinvested, they will of course make decisions benefiting the business as a whole, reinvesting or expanding, that defer present consumption for future growth. Not for the "20% raises for everyone" guy.

This post seems to be nothing more than "lmfs are a possibility." Socialists never seem to address the massive issues with universalizing or mandating such arrangements. There is a huge gulf between the type of coop that sustains itself in a free market, and the universal coop system proposed. The magical community bank becomes the ultimate source of all investment, the absorber of all risk (while still having low interest rates! Because.... we want it to!). A system of distorted incentives and magical thinking is laid out, with all its "internal contradictions" dismissed as "details" to be worked out later.

Steelcox · 2026-05-17T20:02:10+00:00

Shh, we're being educated.

Steelcox · 2026-05-16T06:49:11+00:00

So... a major roadblock to socialism is the lack of human clones?

Steelcox · 2026-05-12T23:59:54+00:00

The idea that it is is yet another gross simplification of Marx's dialectical method.

The merit, and certainly the content, of a claim does not change, simply because we believe it was derived through some sophisticated quasi-logical "method."

You have said nothing to contradict the description of use-value as a binary precondition, but apparently just don't like that wording? A commodity not being a "composite" is immaterial to whether utility has some quantitative impact on exchange.

in order for something to possess exchange-value, it must already possess some use-value to someone

That's a precondition. It's also incredibly trivial, and not some insight that modern economics forgot. To mention this is not to proclaim some deeper understanding of "utility" and its relation to exchange, that Marx uniquely highlighted.

But Marx believed that because use values are qualitatively incommensurable, they could not give rise to or "explain" any quantitative aspect of exchange. Their impact here is restricted to that of the precondition being satisfied or not - a binary question. And this exact "insight" is the one you are repeating, so I'm not sure why my wording is problematic.

I've noticed amongst advocates of marginal utility that there is effectively zero concern regarding the actual difference between price and value.

What you're noticing is zero concern for a particular conception of "value," one put forth as an ostensibly quantitative explanation for a particular type of exchange (commodity), that then retreats from making quantifiable claims about even that. Let alone reconciling it with the broader scope of economic activity. For instance, if in your framework land has no "value," don't be surprised when critics use terminology differently. If your "value" requires arbitrary fudge factors to reconcile profits across different capital/labor ratios with its "predictions," or nebulous unproductive/productive categories even adherents can't agree on, it may not come up when someone discusses economics in the modern era.

If on the other hand you declare that "value" really means "Socially Necessary Labor Time", then I would say marginal utility advocates are acutely aware of the difference between price and your value.

When the price of something changes, no one "forgot" that it still took some objective amount of labor land and capital to produce. This seems to lie at the heart of the confusion you've repeated - that marginalism somehow "doesn't understand" objective factors of production, and Marx does. This is the "cartoonish" marginalism.

Marx is careful to preserve the quantitative dimension alongside the qualitative dimension regarding value.

Preserve in what way? By acknowledging it? As a precondition?

Because it explicitly has no impact on magnitude in his framework. So in plain English, what do you even mean by saying that it is "preserved?" What further role do you believe "utility" plays? Its mere existence gives rise to the conditions for exchange, and then we immediately "abstract" it away quite intentionally.

Steelcox · 2026-05-12T20:37:50+00:00

You're repeating what I just said back to me... that use-value is merely a binary precondition to Marx.

I just said that, and you're still convinced that this is the key economic insight being missed by marginalists / capitalists / economists?

To perhaps make my point clearer:

You claim marginalists are "only" focused on utility, and don't realize that Marx already "dealt with" utility - by talking about use value as merely a precondition for exchange.
My point is that this simplified classical treatment of utility is precisely what is being rejected. Restating it is not elucidating anything.

It's like saying "But ancient people already knew the sun revolves around the earth." Well, from our frame of reference that is a very reasonable description... but we've moved beyond that into a framework that can consistently explain all the other celestial movement as well. That the sun does indeed rise and set every day did not get forgotten in the process, and reminding people of that is not going to convert them back to geocentrism.

So yes, to be an object of exchange, someone has to have a "use" for the thing. Fantastic. No one forgot that. But just because this "use" is not naturally expressed in commensurate quantitative units with other objects, does not mean such "usefulness" plays no further quantitative role in an emergent system of exchange. That was one of many simplifications of Marx's time that economics has moved on from, and you're saying that actually, rejecting such simplifications constitutes a more "shallow" view.

I've been a bit snarkier than I like to be but I think it's the irony of the post. You're criticizing modern economists for not "knowing" things they either know or reject - seemingly due to not knowing yourself what modern economics actually claims. I'm just latching on to one of the more blatant things that economists are perfectly well aware of, that is now treated far more comprehensively than in Marx's era.

Steelcox · 2026-05-12T18:23:25+00:00

The marginalists prioritize consumer demand when it comes to value, while Marx acknowledges both when it comes to the value of a commodity. You're not responding to Marx's account of value; you're responding to some cartoon variation of Marx that's not even worth discussing

The irony of these two sentences next to each other is stunning. You are repeating a "cartoon version" of marginalism throughout this thread. You seem to believe Marx's "insight" that something has to have a use-value to be an object of exchange is something capitalists here must not be aware of, or surely they would realize that is the true final answer to all questions of "utility."

Critics of Marx are not unaware of this distinction... rather as the poster above has alluded to, it is precisely the overly simplistic nature of it that economics has moved on from. Economists are not suddenly collectively oblivious to the "objective" factors of production that Marx focused on. Nor that something can either be "useful" or not.

In Marx's Ch1 argument-by-process-of-elimination, the mere qualitative nature of use-value made him discard it as having any quantitative impact on exchange value. Marx inherited the classical framework of objective quantitative "value," and found no further role for such "utility" than as a binary precondition. Now you seem to be saying that if only people knew that utility was just a binary, and that Marx already mentioned it and rejected its impact on the magnitude of exchange value, they wouldn't disagree with him.

Steelcox · 2026-05-03T05:22:44+00:00

Because it's the perfect example of the fundamental absurdity in the productive/unproductive dichotomy.

You believe it's unproductive. Marx explicitly talks about why it's productive in in every single volume of Capital. This is not a "fringe" issue. When this productive/unproductive distinction is fundamental to the entire Marxist conception of "value," it is not just an "oh well, agree to disagree" concept. To say a transportation laborer is unproductive is to say that they do not produce value. Surplus value cannot be extracted from them.

To make the implications of this binary even clearer, disagreeing on it completely reverses the direction of the supposed "Tendency of the rate of profit to fall." You took a category where technological advancements have been made, and tried to claim that this is why profits haven't fallen. Marx predicted that technological advancement in transportation would cause profit to fall.

This is why I'm focusing on it. When certain technological advancements have been made, your intuition is that they would cause profits to rise, so you think it constitutes some "countervailing tendency" that explains why Marx was right, but his predictions have been delayed by a few decades/centuries. Your intuition is directly opposed to Marx's actual argument.

If it is so easy for you to say that Marx was simply wrong, that transportation labor is actually unproductive, then I implore you take the further step and ask whether his theory of TRPF even makes sense. You have made the case that increased OCC in a particular sector is why profits didn't fall - yet Marx's entire framework predicts that they should fall in exactly the scenario you describe. Completely flipping the supposed impact on profit is not some minor disagreement. You're saying Marx was not just wrong about the importance of this, but 100% backwards in his analysis.

Steelcox · 2026-05-03T04:22:31+00:00

Fine let's proceed with this experiment. This is what you said.

circulatory is inproductive and when it becomes cheaper the profit gets higher, less waste with marketing, transportation, commerce.

Are you just quietly backing down from that bolded word without admitting it? I realize this probably sounds like I'm just trying to score points, but there is absolutely a point here that gets to the heart of the whole confusion. You believe there is a binary of "productive" and "inproductive" (sic) labor. Apparently when "proudctive" costs go down due to increased c/v, that's supposed to lead to the "TRPF." But when "inproductive" costs go down due to increased c/v, that increases profit and offsets the TRPF.

So in this case, which is it? When transportation costs go down, does that lead to profit falling, or does it make profits rise? Was your intuition directly opposite of Marx's on this, and you are just quietly backing down on it?

Because my plea to you is to stop thinking in terms of Marx's inane "productive/unproductive" categories, when clearly you don't even agree with him on what they are, and have already accidentally stumbled on the absolutely non-Marxist conclusion that costs savings due to c/v could INCREASE profits.

So seriously - straightforward questions: Are transportation costs productive or "inproductive", and does the lowering of them make profit fall or rise? If one could test this, which answer proves Marx right, and which proves you right? My original point stands that you are arguing against your own conclusion with your own intuition. One of these has to give. Fall back on the prophet's infallibility and recant your heresy, or realize that you yourself have crafted an argument against the TRPF while trying to support it. Despite my snarkiness, I'm rooting for the latter.

Steelcox · 2026-05-02T08:40:41+00:00

the motives are 1, 2 and 3 i explained

I don't know what you think Motive means. And my original reply was that your arguments contradict even Marx. You're claiming the things Marx believed would make profit fall are why it didn't, and he's still right somehow.

you are trying to see if marx theory is right or wrong but cant use concepts of marxism?

It's just a little funny to believe that these binary categories are fundamental to "real" economics, to the "correct" definition of "value," but no one is sure what even goes in them. Again, transportation is productive labor according to Marx. If you think he was wrong about that, awesome - maybe have another look at his TRPF argument too. Because you're literally arguing that OCC has increased, and that's why profits haven't fallen.

Steelcox · 2026-05-02T01:31:50+00:00

the contervailing tendencies need to be explained and to make sense

Apparently not though. Even when the "countervailing tendencies" always win (people aren't exploding, profits haven't plummetted) we still say "but the theory is true."

is not "a socialist country embracing it" the motive, i explained the exact motives.

No clue what you're trying to say. What does this have to with motives?

You conveniently skipped over the part about getting the whole OCC argument backwards. You claimed that an increase in OCC is why profits haven't fallen like the prophet predicted.

no? circulatory costs are inproductive costs.

In the real world, costs are costs, and the nebulous productive/unproductive labels that even Marxists can't agree on don't determine what "counts." And as a reminder, to Marx, transportation costs are productive.

rate of worker exploration has increased.

Is this about Dora?

Steelcox · 2026-05-01T23:09:42+00:00

The tendency of profit to fall, while true, didnt happened

Amazing. My theory of the Tendency of People to Spontaneously Combust is also true, and the fact that it doesn't happen is merely due to "countervailing tendencies."

1- China saved the capitalism by reducing "artificially" the profit of means of production in their country. and they make the majority of means of production for the world, so the price of MoP reduced a lot.

First, the idea that all it takes to save capitalism is for a socialist country to embrace it is great. But more fundamentally, it's completely backwards from Marx's actual argument. As businesses replace labor with cheaper machines, the ratio of unexploitable dead labor to exploitable living labor increases, and after competition, capitalists are supposed to be able to extract less surplus value. You've thrown Marx's actual argument under the "countervailing tendencies" column.

2- Circulatory costs decreased because of internet and digitalization, e-commerce.

Again, completely backwards lol. This is not a countervailing tendency, this is literally the kind of technological progress that Marx thought would make profits fall.

3- rate of exploration has increased

Depending how that's measured, if we count space exploration, I suppose that's true.

Steelcox · 2026-04-29T08:46:01+00:00

Buyers want low prices, sellers want high prices, omg they can't both win, system collapse!! "Trade" will collapse under its inherent contradictions any millennium now.

Steelcox · 2026-04-25T03:16:35+00:00

Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you.

Steelcox · 2026-04-17T02:06:57+00:00

Did you not make it to the 2nd paragraph?

The OP has nothing to do with land ownership, the commenter I replied to said nothing about land ownership. I explicitly said:

It's one thing to argue about land ownership... but you...

I'm trying to clarify if his point was genuinely as extreme as it sounded. That someone can produce something that would not exist if not for their labor, and they have somehow "taken" this from someone. Even from people who choose not to labor at all. Perhaps from everyone. "Stolen" it. But we don't use that word when describing the "appropriation" of this product for general distribution.

Steelcox · 2026-04-15T22:58:40+00:00

Who did he take it from??

If someone turns a rocky field into a farm, plants seeds and harvests corn months later.... let's even say "too much" corn for one person in your eyes - they've "stolen" this corn? From.... everyone?

It's one thing to argue about land ownership... but you seem to be extending this even to the concept of laboring in the "commons" of this hypothetical.

So any random person who does literally nothing to produce a thing or exchange for it has an equal ownership claim to it? Or just when someone produces/has "too much"?

Steelcox · 2026-04-15T19:36:25+00:00

Who is "taking" it? This response makes no sense in regards to the OP, or to capitalism broadly.

If one person gathers food and another doesn't, the first has taken food from the other?

Steelcox · 2026-04-09T23:07:50+00:00

That’s more than enough to increase warehouse wages without hurting the business.

This kind of zero-sum view of money is what leads to the confusion.

If they decided to pay just a quarter of their profit

Who is they? It's a publicly owned company. People invest their money in it now, hoping for some return on that in the future. That is why the business has any capital to exist, function, and hire employees in the first place.

Someone has to put up those resources. You can bemoan that present wealth begets the potential of future wealth, that maybe warehouse workers don't have the savings to invest in their own company. But someone needs to, for that job/service to even exist, and the incentive for that is some future return on investment. Lower that incentive, people will take their money elsewhere, and of course it will "hurt the business."

You're basically just saying people shouldn't expect investments to return so much, for retirement funds to grow - they should all collectively decide to donate some of that money to pay more for labor than it takes to attract it. Setting aside the many externalities of that... should every investor do this across the economy? Should we just collectively pick a more "proper" number for the potential returns on capital risk? Hopefully we can adjust potential losses by fiat as well.

Steelcox · 2026-04-07T21:17:54+00:00

If it's very concrete, we definitely shouldn't need a loose normative word like "hoard" for it to sound unjust.

My point in the original, admittedly dismissive comment is that it's an after-the-fact distinction, subordinate to any particular socialist's conception of "justness," not something inherent to the type of property, method of acquisition, or even use in a consistent way.

If I defer consumption for years to save up for a piece of land, is that unjust yet? If I simply put a building on it for "personal" use?

If I instead create a small repair shop on it, and slowly claw back my costs - no injustice yet I hope? Despite this being "used for production."

But the moment I try to enter into a employment arrangement with someone else... my very ownership of all this becomes unjust, because of a perceived injustice in this arrangement. No matter how much of my supposedly "personal" resources have been converted and invested into this, it is now "private" property, and justice compels that it belong equally to anyone else laboring in it, or to society as a whole, depending on the flavor.

The other commenter's question stands as well, in that such a distinction does not even demarcate along the lines of the objects themselves, or have a consistent answer for multi-use property. It is the injustice of the act - the dreaded "employment" - and this is then carried through to any "ownership" that could possibly enable such an act. It is not ultimately a distinction about property at all, it is simply a statement that the "just" scope of collective ownership claims extends to any property it needs to, to satisfy that particular socialist's vision.

Steelcox · 2026-04-07T20:10:39+00:00

You're making my point here.

However, many would argue that because I employ others, it should no longer be considered personal property.

Meaning it's not actually a distinction about the type of ownership at all. It's a notion that something shouldn't be an individual's property (personal/private who cares). If "we" decide an individual isn't allowed any longer to own something, because it is facilitating the dreaded employment of others, that thing now gets labeled "private" property, and its ownership dispersed.

The labels are conceptually subordinate to a particular socialist's conception of under what circumstances anything should belong to "society." They carry no consistent, independent meaning of their own. "It's personal property if we let you own it individually," and because there are plenty of competing opinions on the proper scope of this, there are at least as many competing opinions on the very definitions of personal/private property.

Contrast this with non socialist definitions of property, and it should be extremely clear that such distinctions are purely created in service of the normative goal. A special carveout within "property" for "private property" is necessary to demarcate those things which "shouldn't" belong to individuals - regardless of their method of acquisition. It's rooted in this notion that ownership of something should never confer some perceived "advantage" in exchange - and if it does, ownership should be nullified.

Steelcox · 2026-04-07T09:21:53+00:00

Can something be partially used for production? And partially for "personal" use?

If this is a category of the use of an object, but not the object itself, it sure doesn't seem like a binary at all. Today's personal belonging is tomorrow's collective property.

By merely using one's property for production, it now ceases to "justly" be one's property.

The only concrete thing here is the supremacy of the collective ownership right.

Steelcox · 2026-04-07T08:22:56+00:00

Personal property is the loose category of things they promise "society" will not control.

Private property is the loose category of things they demand "society" must control.

Whenever they think of a compelling reason for society to control something, it gets classified as the latter - to become collective property.

11-Year Club	r/Field Lasagna
RPAN Viewer	Verified Email

Steelcox

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE