Let's have a class thread! It'll be fun!
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TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
a footballers wages reflect his exchange value more than his labour value
I'm not sure this is true, about footballers being paid above their value. I might be wrong.
Marx went into the value of gold, I seem to remember. He talked about the way if you added up the labour it took to produce gold, then gold seems to have a value above the amount of labour that was taken to produce it. BUT,,, he argued. That if added to the amount of labour that it took to produce the gold, all the labour that was expended in failing to produce gold, looking for it but not finding it, this explains the difference.
Possibly footballers are in a similar situation. The amount of labour that is put into producing footballers and failing, is what makes the value of the successful ones more valuable.
However, there was another analogy with art. Expensive Rembrandts etc. And I seem to remember this pointing out that the price of something, is not always its value. [In fact I know that Marx definitely explained how the value of commodities and the price of commodities are not the same thing.] There is a question of supply and demand as well. Looking at the price of commodities in the broader term. In booms the price of commodities will sell above their value, but in the crashes commodities will sell below their value. The value of commodities ends up being something like the mean of its prices over time.
Now this is a very very poor explanation. If you want to start going down this path you would be better served with something like, http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
Does anybody have the text from the ragged trousered philanthropist, "the money trick".
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
backatcha bandit has quoted that on here. As part of a criticism of Marx in fact
_angel_
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You don't need to take the loan out, rich parents can pay up front the fees and their kids avoid the debt.
Anyway I was just replying to LLETSA who seemed to think lower middle class parents could somehow afford to do this, I know mine couldn't have.
I wasn't saying that all lower middle class parents can afford to pay the fees, just that they'll find a way. There's a difference. And they'll find a way because, as I said, the popular perception among the middle classes and would-be middle classes now is that you are worthless if you don't go to university; the parents also being worthless if they fail to ensure that their (often thick) offspring get there.
What your parents would have done is irrelevant. They were different times.
_angel_
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Well, if you see that thread about courses being cut at London Met, I think that's basically going to happen - then there will be fewer places available fullstop, some people are bound to miss out. My parents wouldn't have "found a way" to pay the fees, they wouldn't have wanted to or been able to get into more debt at the time.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
fans and supporters often seem to rate a players use value way below the sum paid for him lol
Since then, however, debt has become a more generally accepted thing. Much of the country, as was revealed by the recent crisis, pretty much lives on debt due to the failure of real wages to rise over the past few decades. The illusion of ever-rising living standards has to be maintained somehow.
As I've already said, I not denying that some will miss out; I'm saying what I think will happen generally. Middle class parents will find a way of paying the fees, and the government and the universities know it.
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
but capitalism doesn't. but there again it has a different use.
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
tanx, i'll av a read.
CyberRose
أرفع الشفرات
Fair enough I thought you were saying the tuition fees were a barrier to attending uni, rather than favouring the rich who would not accumulate the debt
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
Invest? That's the problem with you types, you see everything as about what you can make out of it. For me, its the best way to make sure my family has a roof over their heads.
love detective
there's no love too small
littlebabyjesus said:
marx's analysis was never intended to work out exactly how much a particular individual was being exploited though, so not sure you can say it's flawed just because it doesn't do something you mistakenly think it did/was meant to. marx's political economy was mainly about uncovering the inner workings and deep essence of capitalist social relations - it never made any claims to describe exactly what you see on the surface at each and every individual level - that he left to vulgar political economy
That aside, working out exactly how much you are being exploited would be just as 'hard' to do whether you are on 'bad' wages or 'good' wages. exploitation in marx's terms is about how much of the value you 'create' that you don't get to keep - wages are therefore just one part of the equation, so good or bad wages in isolation can give no indication about the level of exploitation. however as value itself is a social, not an individual, phenomenon (and is created at the social, not individual level), it's fundamentally impossible to calculate how much value any one individual actually 'creates'. But again, marx's work never claimed (or saw any worth/point) to do such a thing - so your claims of marxist analysis being flawed in this regard are themselves, unfortunately, flawed.
And you should also be aware that Marx was quite clear that his analysis was that of roles played not of, and about, individuals (meaning different roles could be played by the same person at different/same times - this is the internalisation of capital/labour contradictions that was mentioned earlier on this thread). While class dividing lines were much clearer in those days as you say and roles could be much easier mapped onto individuals in a 1-1 manner, it would be a mistake to think that Marx was not aware of the distinction between individual and roles played or that he based his analysis on individuals who could be neatly classified into a particular category (which happened to exist back in mid/late 19th century). The preface to volume 1 of capital for instance says:-
here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.
So as I said earlier on this thread - this obsession with classification of individuals (and individual occupations) into marxian categories is a bizarre thing to do and something completely at odds with marx's political economy
the relationship between wages paid and the ability of the working class to buy (a sufficient proportion of) capital's goods is very much present within marx's political economy - just one of the many tensions within capitalism that are covered. If workers however were paid wages to the extent that they could buy all of capital's good produced (without recourse to debt) then capitalism would not exist, but it does. Regardless, all of this is very much covered within marx's work, so not sure why you talk about it as though it is outside of it?
I agree Marx's work should be critiqued - problem is large swathes of that critique seem to come from people who have either never read nor understood it as a body of work, leaving a 'critique' which is meaningless and just adds to the confusion (for example this post here is a response to you from me on a thread that had you critiquing marx's analysis of credit/money/circulation despite admitting to having never read any of the parts of capital in which it is covered, and in doing so getting most of it horribly wrong)
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
i wasn't so much critiqueing Marx in that thread as responding to the ideas presented to me in the thread. And i read your posts on it very carefully. On that thread i was mostly asking questions not giving answers
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
David Harvey's companion to Capital is excellent if you want a good understanding of Marx.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I've watched his series of lectures which i think you linked to and which is excellent 
of course you were supposed to have read it first! I've read bits and love detective i admit i might have got bits wrong but specifically in the thread you linked to you failed to convince me. That's why i kept asking questions.
of course you were supposed to have read it first! I've read bits and love detective i admit i might have got bits wrong but specifically in the thread you linked to you failed to convince me. That's why i kept asking questions.
but Harvey's companion does a good job of getting over the basic concepts.
_angel_
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You're doing it again, lumping in all "middle classes", as being the same - what is happening here is a concerted effort to knock out lower middle class, state school kids as much as possible (and of course most working class ones will also be affected). They're not all the same, not everyone is happy, willing or able to get into that much debt. Add that to the making uni places available for the thick-rich, it is as blatant as that.
I haven't said that anybody will be happy about going further into debt, just that they'll have no choice.
I don't believe that any such attempt to prevent lower middle class kids from going to university is taking place, as university is a useful place to park for three years lots of kids who would otherwise be in the shrinking jobs market-and make them pay inflated fees for that dubious privilege. The government knows that, for the reasons I've already explained, people will somehow find a way of paying.
Just wait and see.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
I dunno about that.
The lower m/c are already being hit too hard. Unable to get on the property ladder and still paying off their own student debts leaves them a lot less able to pay the sort of fees that are gonna be charged. Also facing far more uncertainty financially in the future - less capital/assets, pensions disappearing, a longer working life, a shrinking NHS it's all gonna add up. The thousand tiny pin-pricks.
Yes. You did. Then Pickman's once again (presciently) pointed out that you are indeed a 'thick fuck'.
It's OK. I think most people already 'get it'. You don't have to keep showing it time after time.
It will indeed add up. But in the meantime they'll look to get those university fees paid. Somehow. Because for their kids there's literally nowt else other than to muddle through and hope there'll be a job fitting the aspirstions and pretensions to which they've become accustomed. Nobody, least of all the precarious lower middle class, is prepared to admit that their kids are going to be less well off than they were.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I agree with lletsa, I think. There may be a fall in uni attendance, but I don't expect it to be a huge fall. It's a bit like the duty on fags - sure, it is a factor in making some people give up/smoke less, but overall, it is set at a limit designed not to stop people from smoking but rather to maximise revenue.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
You miss my point, I think ...
"But power is not necessary to attain the desired standard of living. "
ORLY?
Now tell me why kabbes is earning the kind of money that soutside never will?
kabbes has the kind of job where you negotiate your salary. He's very, very good at what he does - and so he can essentially write his own pay cheque.
southside has the kind of job where you get the least amount of money per hour possible for the employer to still be able to get someone competent to do the job. And the room for negotiation is essentially zero.
southside is just as skilled at his job as kabbes is at his. It's just that kabbes can point to a bottom line and say: "I made that money appear out of nowhere, so you give me a decent chunk of it or I'll fuck off and show the numbers to someone who does know what I'm worth.
If my contract specified that I would be given 1% (not 10%, like the bankers, just 1%) of the money my work saved the NHS each year - without even including the monetary value of the lives I have helped to save, prolong or protect from harm, I would not only never have to work again, if I married Wayne Rooney he'd be referred to jokingly in the media as a kept man. Proper science is a team sport of course, but I'm talking about after it has been divvied up equally between every member of the team, from admin to boss.
Just ten minutes work I did ten years ago halved the cost of an obscenely expensive drug and more than doubled its cost-effectiveness without any need to consult the drug company. It's no big deal - a competent maths A level student would spot it, and my students can spot it for themselves approximately two hours after they all told me they were terrified of statistics and maths was a mystery to them. But somehow, the FDA (allegedly the toughest regulatory body in the world) missed it 12 years earlier, and so did the EMEA (European regulatory authority).
But I'm a public sector scientist who does the job well because the job has to be done well when the FDA has been bought up by big business and the EMEA is too scared to say that the FDA got it wrong. So not only do I not get any bonus at all, ever, I can't even afford to live in the city where I work.
But I could earn as much as kabbes if I too were willing to serve the forces of evil
p @ kabbes). But if I did what I do for a drug company, I would know how many people I'd harmed or killed or shortened the lives of. kabbes has the luxury of distance from his unidentifiable victims. I choose, instead, to use my power to maximise my quality of life. And that means being able to live with the idea that, wholly imperfect as I am, it's OK to be me. I will do training for drug companies, but I don't get a lot of work from them because I always use their most egregious frauds as examples in an attempt to effect a reverse brain drain through the medium of people having consciences. I get superb feedback from the attendees, the organiser always says they need to set up a series of these workshops because it's what they need, and then ... nothing. 
And that's why I say it's fuck all to do with the money. The 'lotto lout' who blew millions in almost no time at all had the power to give him and his friends the time of their lives for a while, but he was powerless to make sure that he could do that forever.
Power is the ability to get what you want. It just so happens that in a world which says value is defined as money, an awful lot of people will choose to abuse their power in order to take as much money for themselves as they can.
But worse than that, it virtually forces everyone else to do the same thing because what the rich are able to spend buying up the properties at the very top of the obscene housing market has a knock on effect on every single other person who rents or owns a home further down the ladder right to the cheapest slovel in the country.. They don't just steal our labour, they have so much more money than they need, they increase out cost of living every time they buy something that is scarce for silly money.
It's easy for me to turn down buckets of cash, because I've discovered that heaven on earth is to go on permanent holiday cruising the UK waterways with the person you love, with occasional breaks for work to pay the bills. I wouldn't swap it for all the money in Goldman Sachs. Although if someone offered to bring down the banking system by giving me all their money I would, of course, sacrifice myself for the greater good and agree to take it.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
How can he be anything other than the elite with that kind of power? He need never lift a finger again and 12,000 lock-ups will keep him and his family in idle luxury essentially forever.
The footballer has no such power.
But if he invested his money wisely, he could have.
Tricky, innit?
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
Yes. I think that's right.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
That is such utter fucking bollocks, IMO, you're going to have to justify it to me before I waste any stress reading the rest of the post.
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