You bring to light two alternative ways to sell an item such as a particular type of shoe:
Encourage the customer to come to their own decision by being as neutral yet informative as possible.
Appeal to the customer’s sense of belonging by emphasising your own expertise and knowledge of the current fashion that you and others follow.
Each approach is appropriate in different circumstances to different types of customer. Often working class people are very trend-conscious and want to get what everyone else has, looking to people like you to tell you what that is from first-hand experience. Technique number 2 is more applicable in this situation, as well as with customers who are too indecisive to choose what they want for themselves. They need a push.
You advocate technique number 1, which is generally my preferred approach, but I know from experience that it is not always optimal. My point is that in certain situations such as in homogeneous communities, being too open and conscious of nuance in your sales approach is ineffective.
This is a tangent of course, and one in which I do unfortunately have far too much experience.
Back to minimum wage, I remain unconvinced that splurging applies to those on or near minimum wage - though I agree it does apply to much of the working class, however I believe this issue to be irrespective of minimum wage. Bear in mind you ARE talking to someone on next to minimum wage, who works with colleagues and customers who are almost exclusively working class and occasionally on minimum wage too.
OK, so who are more trendy experts: working class people or the bourgeoisie?
Everyone needs to compete socially in order to network into the workforce. Even when it comes to necessities, people are deciding how desperately they want things in the moment versus saving for the future. Those who are willing to spend the most will accumulate the most and best quality. Those who are willing to save the most will accumulate less.
I was not referring to “true Marxism”, I am referring to a more common, problematic interpretation and application of Marxism, which is based in hate for, and war with, all upper classes and capitalists.
Yes do say more.
From the library website I am reading at, it looks like Marx and Engels have spent allot of time writing. I wonder to myself if they spent like over half of their life writing, since the library is so big. Of-course they would need to eat and sleep too, but, to get the full meaning of what Marx and Engels are about would take time. I am reading some, but there is much left to read also.
I was just trying to broaden the discussion a bit. The thread wasn’t going anywhere that interested me, even though the topic itself does interest me. I was trying to make it more fun for me, it was entirely selfish. The graph on its own doesn’t prove much, but is moderately amusing.
Okay, in the Marxist analysis is it not profit per se that is opposed, it is when certain class and economic dynamics lead inevitably to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and Marx in particular identified that the ownership of the means of industrial production (he was talking 19th century factories, remember) by what he called the bourgeois capitalist class was critical to these dynamics. If you’re a factory worker then the wage-labour exchange is such that you’ll never be able to afford to open your own factory. You just can’t work enough hours for that to happen. Meanwhile, the bourgeois capitalist isn’t really doing much work at all but is taking a larger proportion of the profits of doing business than anyone.
However, it gets a little more complex than that when you get into the question of surplus value, which a lot of people confuse with profits. On the contrary, surplus value is the additional price, both taken from the consumer and from the people whose labour produced the product being sold, that is added on by the capitalist purely for their own gain. The cost of the good is the raw materials plus the labour to make it (and ship it to the shop and put it on the shelves) but the price of products is higher than this - this ‘surplus value’ is one mechanism by which the bourgeois capitalist class ensures that the working class remains relatively poor.
We can identify surplus value in massive corporate profits, and in share prices and so on and you’re right, a lot of people equate the two and this is a confusion. Someone making a profit from adding their labour to raw materials is what enables trade, is what enables people to gain access to things they cannot produce for themselves. There is literally nothing in Marxist philosophy (taken literally, i.e. the stuff written by Marx and Engels) that contradicts this. If anything, part of Marx’s argument that the workers should collectively own the means of production and that the bourgeois class should be destroyed is that it means they can all share in the profits and thereby become wealthier, instead of working to make some other asshole rich.
Engels was a member of the bourgeois capitalist class, and he subsidised Marx’s life in Britain and thus Marx’s writings. Marx did spend most of his time writing, to my knowledge he never had what you might call a ‘proper job’. Not that this invalidates his writings, it just makes him a bit of a bloody hypocrite.
Anyway, my hostility towards you is because this is the heart of the problem: you have a bunch of people who’ve never read Marx misquoting their assess off, blaming the wrong people in the wrong ways for the problems of capitalism, and they invite criticism from another bunch of people who’ve never read Marx, blaming the first lot of people and therefore wasting everyone’s time and distracting everyone from the actual problems of capitalism. It just strikes me that if these people devoted half as much effort to reading Marx as they did to either heroising or demonising his work and its consequences, then they might learn something and get somewhere.
Not that I’m even defending Marx or his philosophy, I think there’s all sorts of things he didn’t foresee and didn’t understand, I’m just saying if people had the patience to learn before making a judgment then they’d have a better quality of thoughts about topics. Arguing with what some dickhead activist in a Che Guevara t-shirt says about Marxism just drags us down.
Furthermore, it’s part of the whole left-right ding dong waste of time paradigm. On the Left you’re right, a lot of it is about blaming profits, blaming corporations, blaming capitalism, and there’s a real hostility. On the Right a lot of it about blaming taxes, blaming governments, blaming socialism, and there’s a real hostility. On the Left they’ll defend government saying that if you get the right politicians in charge of the system then you can make it work wonders. On the Right they’ll defend corporations, saying that if you get the right capitalists in charge of the market then it will magically make everyone rich. Alternatively, in place of the concentrated spectacle of the great political leaders or the great entrepreneurs who we credit with making our lives better both sides make use of the diffuse spectacle and praise the system itself. It isn’t the people in government that make it good, it’s the government itself. It isn’t the individual capitalists who provide for us, it is the ‘free market’ itself.
I see, so it’s not profits per se that is opposed, only profits of the non-working business owners which is created by what is called ‘surplus value’ that is opposed, am I getting that right?
So eg I get a bunch of iron and wood, pretty low in value in its raw form, and make an axe, and sell it, and I’ve created the good kind of profit for myself as a worker.
Whereas alternatively, an entrepreneur buys some raw iron and wood, hands it to me to make an axe out of it, pays me my wages, and then sells it for (my wages) + (cost of materials) + (surplus value) to someone else, is that more or less the formula?
A lot of so-called Marxists do indeed proclaim ‘profit is evil’, hence the widespread misconception. That is a bit more of a tenable position, though I don’t agree that that is by necessity bad/evil in and of itself still.
In itself, perhaps not, but what is evil in and of itself?
The issue for Marx is the economic dynamics and their inevitable outcomes, however blinkered and at times utterly wrong headed he might have been in that effort.
i don’t think that’s entirely true - certainly there is a stigma associated with working for minimum wage, but probably not everyone who does it has been so harshly branded. i mean, a LOT of people work at or around minimum wage, so surely they can’t all be social throwaways
For someone to be labelled a dysfunctial reject requires them to have been judged by some set of standards, which may or may not be subjective, and i would say such a judgment could be accurate within certain frames of reference. But you’re right that a term like dysfunctional reject doesn’t usually indicate a fundamental ontological state (or whatever).
i agree
Yeah, but as i explained i don’t really think they’re accurate. Take the fast food as an example - that doesn’t qualify as splurging, as it is often the cheapest form of sustenance readily available to many poor and working lower class people.
Of course that’s true, but these things become necessities over time. Try holding any normal full time job without a personal phone.
There’s validity to this. Minimum wage can kind of serve as a gateway drug to gross consumption. Work, buy, consume, work, buy, consume, work, ad infinitum - i think you said something about training teenagers to be good consumers by giving them minimum wage jobs that i agreed with. But on the flipside are actual individuals with no economic safety net struggling just to keep themselves fed with a roof over their head. Minimum wage can make a big difference for people if they find themselves in a situation where their only resort is to work at Walmart, and that’s something that can happen even to people who are not dysfunctional rejects.
“my hostility towards you”
Strange that you would call it hostility. You don’t seem hostile to me, yet.
Based on the little bits I’ve read about Technocracy and Marxism, is that the productivity of humanity is at an all-time-high. The amount of energy sources you have directly equates to how much you can produce. Marx wrote stuff back when there was still steam power and coal. But today we have allot of energy. Our richness should be at an all-time-high, also, if it doesn’t get wasted or taken away somehow. We used-to only have man-power. Now we have natural gas, coal, fossil fuel, solar, wind, etc. Now on this one point, I may be wrong: but Marx considered communism inevitable. It was the natural consequence of the way everything was going. I think even the worker’s in this modern capitalist system are more rich than people used-to be 100 years ago, but they would be richer if they owned a percent of the means to production. Communism isn’t the only way to do this, but it is the idea that became popular.
This, I think, results from the beast that Capitalism is: it depends on an ever-increasing appetite. It can only be sustained through increasing standards of consumption and change. And any psychology class will tell you that change is synonymous with stress.
In other words, Capitalism is dependent on stress and the ends that people will go to to lessen it.
I haven’t read Marx, because I find him extremely boring–but I have read economic theory to some extent. Firstly, Marx outlined his economic theories in Das Kapital–Capital–which I think is the economic defense of his social theories. He believed that labor had value and that some of that value depended on the time spent laboring. He also believed that laborers should have more compensation than just the time spent laboring so as to adequately provide for a future generation of laborers. If wages weren’t sufficient to raise another generation of laborers, there’d be no more laborers.
One way to do that would be to limit the number of hours worked–especially for women and children–because if a laborer worked beyond the amount of time needed to earn his wage, he’d be contributing to the surplus value of the capitalist organization which, in Marx’ time, was individual or family owned factories. Marx wasn’t really that concerned with minimum wage–he was himself a member of the Bourgeoisie and didn’t have to worry about it.
But capitalism in the USA isn’t really capitalism. It’s more a sort of socialist capitalism in that shareholders ‘own’ a part of the means of production. An economic system is one thing–a political/social system isn’t an economic system. If y’all are talking about economic theories, that’s one thing, but an economic theory isn’t a political/social theory, although it might lead to one.
You’re right, the amount of energy available is the key to growth in production, and just now we are seeing the limits to that growth. The fundamental cause of the current recession across the West is that there’s no more cheap surplus energy. Loads of people will blame it on the Fed or the government or anything else except their own irresponsibility in consuming too much too quickly and expecting it to last forever, but the truth is that we just can’t pump oil out of the ground any faster than we are currently.
Nonetheless, Marx was writing in an essentially pre-oil age so he didn’t see the wheels coming off as a result of peak oil, he just saw certain economic dynamics that would inevitably lead to, for example, a situation whereby the workers were so poor that they couldn’t afford to buy the products they were making, leading to a collapse in demand and thus bankrupting the whole system. That was the inevitable collapse of capitalism he predicted. What he failed to understand was the importance of central banks in creating perpetual growth in demand, and that the capitalists would globalise their system making Western workers much better off and transferring their poverty to brown skinned people in foreign countries. Those are the two mechanisms in the 20th century by which the model of state capitalism has developed, and by which the dynamics Marx identified in the 19th century have been altered.
One should also bear in mind that Marx always say Communism, particularly state Communism, as a transitional phase. It hasn’t tended to work out that way in countries that have attempted state Communism, but the idea was that Communism would be like a reset button and that the need for collective ownership through the state would dissolve and that ‘the state will wither away’ leaving anarchy, ironically enough the closest thing we have to the ‘true free market’ that those who are viciously opposed to Marx advocate so noisily. Now, Marx might have been wrong about all of this, but that was the theory he espoused.
In a sense, Marx has been rendered unnecessary. For one thing, the Capitalism of today being quite different from the Capitalism of Marx’s time, he seems now, as many critics say, obsolete -much as Smith’s writings on Capitalism are. For another, there have been so many books put out since him, both Marxist and non-Marxist, that are more up to date critical studies of Capitalism, that the only reason left for reading him would be out of historical interest.
Still, one of these days I hope, given the time, to dig in to his writings. But the critical theorists seem a little more immediate and relevant to me.
And, yeah, a lot of the problem that arises in the discourse comes from confusing the economic system itself, which is socially neutral, and the social policies that are instituted under it. The only thing necessary about any economic system is the system itself. The social policies that follow are more times than not contingencies instituted under the pressure of real or perceived imperatives.
This underlies one of the problems I have with Democrats and unions even though, officially, I support both. They put too much focus on more (more pay and benefits) when the only real issue lies in a complex of relationships. For instance, it’s not so much a matter of what you make as much of how much you make as compared to everyone else. I make relatively good money. But if the person serving my hamburger at Burger King or my Bartender were making the same wage, my pay rate wouldn’t mean much since the price of my burger and beer would be such that I would not be any better off than the person serving them to me. Furthermore, the certifications I had to work to achieve that wage wouldn’t mean much if everyone went out and got the same ones. In other words, in order for anyone to win in Capitalism, someone else has to lose. These things are necessary to the very ideology of Capitalism. The point is that in Capitalism it is always an issue of something a little more complex than more. It’s not that we’re not making enough; it’s that everything costs too much. Yet, democrats, unions, and minimum wage increases tend to focus on the one sided aspect of more. And ultimately all this leads to is inflation through wage push and wage pull. However, at the same time, I have to cede to Silhouette:
I agree with Silhouette in that minimum wage increases do create a temporary bump to the economy due to the lag between the increase and the adjustment of the exchange value of goods produced -as I would cede to their point concerning the disruption created by dropping the minimum in an economy that had one as compared to one that didn’t (I hope I’m remembering this right). However, doesn’t this point, as Silhouette suggests, to the virtual means by which Capitalism must sustain itself? That is given its over-dependence on expansion, growth, and change as compared to stability? Doesn’t this point to my view of Capitalism as a candidate for the Beast with a perpetually increasing appetite?
The point is that I think we need to quit assuming Capitalism and start thinking in terms of taking the profit motive out of some aspects of the economy, thereby securing a minimally comfortable life for the person serving my burger or beer and lowering the expectations of the rich by creating a situation in which we are not fully dependent on the private sphere. And if the Capitalists were as sure about the value of competition as they claim to be, they would have no issue with this. But I doubt that is the case as was demonstrated by their resistance to the public option in healthcare.
I think this is a little more complex, Dan, than you are making it sound.
For one thing, it’s about a lot more than directly equating profit with exploitation, oppression, etc.; it’s about recognizing that the profit seeking motive can lead to those things. As even Marx recognized, the rich are as subject to the forces of Capitalism as the proletariat. Or as Jonathon Wolff, the writer of Why Read Marx Today points out on a podcast of PhilosophyTalk: you simply cannot surrender yourself to the forces involved in Capitalism and not expect problems.
And while those who claim their Marxist roots can be hateful, a lot of this comes out of combination of frustration and fear. The frustration comes from, especially in America, from a discourse that is so loaded against any cynical view of Capitalism as to be like talking to a wall. What the skeptic is always up against is this notion that Capitalism is like some natural force in our lives –like the weather or something. It’s like no matter what policy we institute, Capitalism will always have the last word. For instance, if one presents the idea that we institute a more progressive tax system so we can pay for the safety nets needed to catch those that Capitalism drops out, the response is that then the so-called “job creaters” will just throw a pissy fit and leave the country. But this argument assumes that once they have done so, that will be the end of it. But this argument fails to recognize that there is always something else the government can do. It could, for instance, tax every dollar that individual makes in America or put tariffs on any product that individual tries to import into the country. Or we could expand the public economy in order to offset any loss we might suffer from the loss of that individual. The point is that a government that was truly looking out for our interests in the face of the rich always has a move they can make, regardless of what the rich does.
The fear comes from the fact that while we are buying into this BS. Meanwhile, the profit seekers, who have no vested interest in democracy or freedom, are in the process of establishing an emerging aristocracy/oligarchy. Right now, we may well be dealing with an inverted totalitarianism that puts economy above state as compared to a classical one that puts state above economy. But we have to ask what happens when there is no longer a consumer base to justify the privilege of the rich. Are they just going to give up their privilege? Or will they just switch it all, through their insider status, to a classical totalitarianism in which state is given privilege over economy? Except as a state that they happen to own?
Now does this mean that those who claim their Marxist roots hate the rich? No. I have seen rich people do some noble things such as Buffett who championed a higher tax rate for the rich. And even a hardcore Marxist would have to give props to George Sore. Nobody wants to strip the rich of all their assets and distribute BMWs in the ghettos. We all recognize the import of incentives. What we are opposed to, and adamantly so, is the do-or-die nature of Capitalism as it is now. There is no reason whatsoever for the working class to have to deal with the stressors they are just so a handful of people can experience way more wealth than they will ever need in their lifetime. And this not to mention the issue of Global Warming that Capitalism plays a major role in. In a sense, there is almost a kind of Calvinistic notion involved in that the rich think they can survive, due to their resources, the withering landscape their push for consumption will create.
With all due respect, SIATD, this would be a more valid argument if this were purely a hermeneutic debate over what Marx said or didn’t say. But as usually happens, this is more about how his ideas, or the residual cynicism concerning Capitalism (the specter of Marx as Derrida puts it), applies to our economy today.
Confession: I haven’t read Marx either. Hope to; but haven’t had the time. But given all the reading material related to him that I have and all the other criticisms of Capitalism that have emerged since his time, and given their relevance to Capitalism as it is practiced today, I’m not sure I really need to. And do we really need every worker in the world to read Das Kapital to know that they’re being exploited?
And while this probably wasn’t you, I think we need to consider the ontological status of a hippy wearing a Che Riveras tee-shirt at a protest as compared to what we’re doing here. The hippy, regardless of the sophistication of their ideological motives, is presenting the balls to actually go out and do something about the problem. We, on the other hand, are just talking about it.
You’re making it sound as if some exact explanation of what Marx meant is more important than the goal he had in mind. And, to me, given what I know about him, nothing could be a bigger misrepresentation of Marx.
Ultimately, guys, I think we are going to have to stop thinking in terms of abstractions like Marxism, Communism, and Capitalism, and start thinking in terms of individual policies.
This has value to the extent that it can establish a foundation for any choice we make. But in the long run, this is little more than an intellectual pissing contest.
FDR, in his impatience with ideology, had no use for Keynesian theories. Yet his applications of them in the New Deal did a lot of good.
if any of you are in doubt about the hegemony that Capitalism is engaged in, or are enamored with its supposed intimate and exclusive relationship with Freedom, take the plight of smokers right now:
We hear a lot about how much smokers are costing the system.
But what we don’t hear is a question as to why they are costing so much.
To give you anecdotal example, I recently went in to the doctor to get my 50+ checkup. And I mistakenly made the move of telling him I smoked. What he did was set me up with a breathing test purely for the sake of his using his expertise to say he “told me so”. The thing was I passed those test at above a 100% of the expected. I ended up getting a bill for about 380$ for the privilege of shitting in his face.
But for a stupid little test in which I breathed into a sensor for a computer, and the nurse that happened to be there, the actual charge was about 600$+. This, of course, was reduced by the so-called reduction my insurance company got for me. In other words, all we are paying for with insurance is having the price of healthcare reduced to the price it should be in the first fucking place. And I work for a fucking hospital. In other words, they have designed a way to give me good pay while taking a great deal of that money back.
The next step will be the wellness programs -that is for you fat people out there or that eat too much cholesterol.
Now is there any wonder I consider Capitalism despicable? That is without having actually read Das Kapital?
We, as intellectuals, are not immune to the despicable shithole Capitalism is making of the world. This is because it is a sickness much like alcoholism.
And until we are willing to admit we have it, we cannot possibly begin to cure it.
Of course, we’ll cite Nietzsche to prove me wrong. But our willingness to cite Nietzsche seems like part of the problem to me. Nietzsche would prove to be little more than an alibi: since I can cite Nietzsche, I am too smart to actually be sick.