no i'm sorry you're right, i like your version where i risk losing everything at the drop of a hat in return for nothing whatsoever
as always their logic is guaranteed to extend precisely as far as it needs to in order to support their position and no further
these people are tiring in the absolute worst way
Those only happen every decade, goldfish brain libs always seem to forget about little details like that.
"Has profits"
Ah yes, that thing that naturally occurs with no input. Profits grow like mold in a damp closet. You come in on Monday, might as well check the bathroom ceiling for profits
Fucking moron you get your entire economic education from memes, if you can't mathematically explain to me how you can disprove the formula for the falling rates of profit as illustrated as the following
p' = s/C = s/(c + v)
Then you know literally as much about how the economy works as a rabid dog
my brain is poisoned from STEMland, is p' in this case
dp/dtwherepis profit?I believe it is technically, as it is the rate of profit, but I don't believe Marx does a derivative to find this formula. See here
ok, yeah, he's not doing derivatives, but that is what he means.
it's kind of hard to actually fully express the idea of the falling rate of profit mathematically. you'd essentially want to show that on average, p' < 1 (i would guess based on Marx's formula, given that it's positive-definite and therefore, the requirement certainly couldn't logically be that p' is on average negative-definite).
yeah, i mean i think forcing marx into a specific mathematical model misses the point entirely for the most part. it's just that there is a consistent mathematical way to phrase "tendency" which is in terms of time-averaged behaviors, which are a well-studied mathematical field. the tendency for the rate of profit to fall would be most accurately phrased mathematically as a statement about some abstract objects that have a specific time-averaged behavior, that marx therefore asserts is a dialectically correct interpretation of the aggregate behavior of capital. saying that it is "on average" falling is to actually say that it does have counter-tendencies that change the local behavior but not the behavior over sufficient time scales.
that's what i'm saying though is that you could do it, but to do so would be to miss the point. i don't think that makes a law of it though, just a model of a particular abstract thing. to proscribe mathematically is to insist that you can come up with a mathematically coherent and empirically observable set of quantities. no more, no less.
Yeah, iirc (I have not read Capital) the fall of the rate of profit is due to the competition of various businesses
i have also not read capital, but my understanding is that the falling rate of profit is due to the competition of various businesses, and the profit-crushing nature of technological improvements in efficiency. the value of goods falls as they are produced more efficiently, and therefore, the profitability of commodities will trend downwards as competition compels businesses to become more efficient for the sake of the short-term.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch03.htm
So the P' is Profit Prime I believe, and that is a mathematical doohicky to make a graph that illustrates the falling rate of profit
definitely a "sort of" derivative then. economists learn to apply calculus without concluding you need to eat the poor challenge (actually impossible)
To disambiguate:
p' == profit rate
s == surplus value
C = capital
c == constant Ccapital (maintenance, materials)
v = variable capital (Wages)
So p' is not
dp/dtit'sdp/dvwithcbeing the +C constant because capital costs are fixed directly into the end product (if materials cost 40 and you can make 40 units, that's exactly $1 per unit fixed cost, but if you can push workers to make 3/hr instead of 2/hr you've reduced your labor cost by 30%).s'is defined asds/dvwhere the rate of surplus is total surplus divided by wages.So an increase in
vwill result in a decrease in bothp'ands'.And for clarity, the reason
cis constant is because this process of surplus value extraction has already been applied to it. The fractional/raw materials are coming from another industry that has already extracted surplus and as a result turned the commodity into a store of use value and dead labor (profit). Something that can't have any more value extracted from it.ok thanks, i actually wondered if i had guessed wrong because i'm so used to time being the quantity that rate is relevant to.
Yeah, most of Marx's formulas leave time out of the equation as all that you really need to understand the
flow of capitalgeneration of profit is the relations between capital, material, and wages.If you read his examples though, time does come into play when dealing with time based pay (e.g. $20/week). But because time isn't in the base formulas, they still apply to wage relations that are per unit.
which makes sense, it wouldn't make sense to model what he wanted with time.
That being said, he did toy with the idea of time based labor vouchers and the concept of labor time. Something that is necessary as humans do live in a world where time progresses and time is a limited thing for all of us.
But when looking at profit, time only comes in as a secondary factor for reducing wages. E.g. getting people to make 3 widgets an hour instead of 2, which in the formula is represented as a change in
s'because the share ofCgiven out asvfalls.This is also what kick-starts the falling profit rate, as increasing worker productivity requires (in most cases) increases in the share of
Cgiven out asc(new machinery, training, better materials, etc.). Since profit is derived fromvand notc, that means total profit can increase while rate of profit decreases. The totalCgoes up, but the share ofvthat makes it up decreases (while totalvincreases) which leads to decreasing rates of profit with increasing total profit.
What a shit meme, workers already bear (an unequal) share of losses under a privately-owned enterprise.
It's a bad meme since "profit" is inherently capitalist only an economy in which the value form is dominant will care for profit. The workers shouldn't want a share of the profit they should want to produce and consume rational and eliminate things like money, markets and profits from th equation.
Investors aren't able to pull money out of the savings accounts of workers, which is what happens under Communism, sweetie
The worker can lose their tenured job on a moments notice simply because the current quarterly fiscal report isn't showing the unrealistic level of growth that the execs promised the shareholders.
This original post seems confused about how capitalism even works. Workers do share the loss if the company they work for tanks, it means they have to get a new job, and god forbid if they had a retirement plan or something with their workplace because that might be gone too. Hardly anyone has a pension anymore either.
It's such a cliche that the capitalist is taking on the greatest amount of personal risk to operate a business. They're risking the chance they'll lose their property, which the worker doesn't have in the first place. They're risking becoming a worker like everyone else. Oh no, the horror.
A socialist context wouldn't necessarily involve profit or losses, right? A planned economy like Cuba or Vietnam or something, they have mandated outputs they'll need over the next 5 years. Profit's not the incentive, it's meeting the goals and quotas. Failing to meet the quotas means you gotta redraw the plan, because something's not working out right. I guess in that sense the workers do share the losses in a socialist context, because everyone wasted their time, or may not have produced enough of something, but you know that's not all bad. The first five-year plan in the Soviet Union didn't meet quotas, but the second one did.
The incentive in a socialist context is still realized value in the form of wages to an extent. Just with hopefully a medium of exchange that isn't tied to finance, but instead to actual labor values of goods produced.
Over time the need for this exchange system should hopefully melt away, but that requires an end of scarcity and full employment with robust planning and taxation systems to maintain social services for pensions, development of new industry, and maintenance of existing industry.
The also needs to be a way to directly and easily compare use values of different products and calculate total labor content of light industrial goods with dozens of hundreds of input materials.
The USSR had a dual banking system for a while the separated investment capital from worker and exchange capital so a failed investment wouldn't devalue the wages of workers. Something that would never be done in the West because the devaluation of wages caused by failed capital ventures is a positive side effect to capitalists.
these craven fools really think we're too ignorant to know that capitalists have completely insulated themselves from consequences for losses. yeah, if Bill Gates fumbles tomorrow, he'll be out on the street, sure. :maybe-later-kiddo:
Zuckerberg wasted untold billions on the Metaverse and he's still one of the richest people on the planet
If his company is worth billions then ipso facto the Metaverse must have been a good idea.
You don't even have to go to somebody as rich as Bill Gates. Holders of a company's stock don't suddenly go into debt when the company takes out a loan and isn't profitable yet.
We fucking DO share the losses already. Hours get cut. Policies change. Layoffs happen. Workers basically shoulder ALL of the losses!
When the company can't make payroll, they don't sell off their means of production to pay it. They fire people.
browsing reddit is self harm
browsing r/EnoughCommieSpam is double self harm
censoring the names of reactionaries is triple self harm
No. Companies should not "share" the profits with the workers. That's kind of our whole deal, the workers should just take the profits. All of them.
I would like to highlight, too, that Marx builds up on Ricardo who builds up on Smith and all of those are more or less agreeing that society reproduces and that the profit motive from capital means that it is a necessity for reproduction of society and thus capitalism's reproduction that there is a profit.
It doesn't have to be in every company, but over statistical averaged time frames there will be profits averaged over companies and sectors.
However there is another answer which is that: Workers do already burden the highest costs and the highest losses of companies. Not only do they have to work, they lose money and pay with their health and their families and communities health, they are not paid when the company fails and are often not paid even though bosses or investors are paid. Even if we ignore wage theft and see it from capitalists lense then it is the worker who gets stolen from most and who loses most if a company fails.
It also needs emphasis that capitalist loss and gain are in terms of value, an abstract capitalist version of wealth and not direct material wealth. The same amount of value can represent different amounts of commodities depending on the productivity of labor at a given time. We are hilariously more materially productive today than we were in Marx’s time, but the logic of capital demands that, nope, we still need to gain by X% over the invested value regardless of how many physical commodities are required to embody that value. So, when we speak of sharing losses with workers, we should remember that we’re talking about a specific kind of loss that doesn’t necessarily even mean we’re struggling in terms of absolute material wealth.
Good points. I also didn't mention cyclical problems of capitalism, or that those workers who clock in and [want] to "do their hours" would still have very vested interests about how many hours they have to do. The objective interest of the working class gets hidden by talk as the anti-communist poster did.
That's why the economy should be planned. Capitalist accumulation and production for profit leads to crises of overproduction. Communism isn't just about workers getting their full share, it's about production for the social good and not for profit.
It's the difference between liberals forbidding locks on dumpsters outside grocery stores after a civil war and making sure there's enough food and it's distributed well
It's true, actually, I spend the majority of every hour of my life devoted to something I will never reflect on.
