The Political Impact of Marx's Form Analysis | Red May 2021

[@jessesaranow7724]

Heinrich is incredible

[@Comrade_Zaz]

time for Vawlue theory

[@stavroskarageorgis4804]

The "Trinity (Land, Capital, Labor|Ground-rent, Interest and Profit of Enterprise, Wage) Formula".

[@mch2241]

great talk thank you

[@NathanWHill]

Anwar Shaik has (to me) a convincing discussion that the labor time in (to use his term) 'regulating capitals' is a good proxy for socially necessary abstract labour, because 'socially necessary' is largely determined by the competitiveness of labour and capital markets. He also argues that regulating capitals, which he defines as those using the lowest cost reproducible methods of production, can be identified by looking at new investment in a sector. So, I think that Heinrich's somewhat overstates that abstract labour cannot be measured with a watch.

[@Kriskazam]

You can measure it with a watch but it’s not grounded in anything concrete. It’s still a social form rather than a material form.

[@marshallsolomon9488]

The time of value is measured post festum or retrospectively. Concrete labor must become abstract, as Marx puts it in the Contribution. This is bc value is a social form of labor, not a natural form-- which can be measured by a watch while being performed. Shaik is a respectable. But I think Marx's criticisms of Ricardo 's methodology or approach to value applies to him as well

[@NathanWHill]

@@marshallsolomon9488 I agree. On several respects (esp. transformation problem) Shaikh is closer to Ricardo or Sraffa than Marx. But I would still say that Shaikh's approach with 'regulating capitals' is a good _approximation_ to measuring value in Marx's understanding. I worry that value form analysis leads to a quietism vis à vis econometrics and that this quietism takes something of the sting out of the tail of Marxian economics qua *critique* of political economy.

[@marshallsolomon9488]

@@NathanWHill "I worry that value form analysis leads to a quietism vis à vis econometrics and that this quietism takes something of the sting out of the tail of Marxian economics qua critique of political economy." I think this is definitely the crux of it. But I see it oppositely. Marx was not an economist. He was a critic of bourgeois political economy, particularly the way in which it reifies, fetishizes, and mystifies social forms. So the point of Capital is not to give a proper economic accounting of commodity prices or something like that. That is what an economist would do. The point is to lay bare the reified economic forms as socially and historically constituted, and to lay bare the potentialities within them. The reading of Marx qua Economist brackets out these fundamental aspects and replaces them with overly-empirical and overly-mathematical reductions: magnitudes and quantities are concerns of economists. This is an uncritical approach that operates with the empirically given, both quietist and conservative in nature.

[@MrxstGrssmnstMttckstPhlNelThot]

Wait where did the live chat go? I was just watching the VOD less than a half hour ago and could read the chat but now it's gone?

[@MrxstGrssmnstMttckstPhlNelThot]

There were some interesting discussions going on in the chat, it would be quite sad if those were permanently lost to time now.

[@RedMayTV]

The live chat is in a review process with KZbin. We're looking into it and will do our best to enable it as soon as we can!

[@MrxstGrssmnstMttckstPhlNelThot]

@@RedMayTV Great!

[@fakejasonlawless]

your user name is great

[@MrxstGrssmnstMttckstPhlNelThot]

@@fakejasonlawless oh thanks

[@stavroskarageorgis4804]

German speakers mispronouncing "analysis" in English is very confusing. Análysis, darn it!

[@julesgleeson1237]

Given Heinrich’s name gets mispronounced right at the start it seems only fair.

[@stavroskarageorgis4804]

@@julesgleeson1237 Of course. Turn around is 'fair play'.

[@SusanSt.James-33]

I would not like to be captured by pronunciation fetishism, I would rather focus on the knowledge content.

[@tarcisiorodrigues9244]

This was such an inspiring and thought-provoking lecture; thank you! Listening to the questions, I remembered many conversations I’d already had with others. I think there is a common concern about what guarantees we have that - under a post-capitalist society where substantive equality should be the rule - that this indeed would be the case; we do not want to waste our time in a revolutionary process leading us to an equally oppressive world. I don’t know of any such guarantee made by serious revolutionaries. What we aim with a socialist revolution is to go beyond capital and the current bourgeois state - such a revolution would sweep out of the map the most devastating and demeaning of the oppressions: the one through which the immense majority of humans are forced into a life of exploitation by a threat of death by starvation - the current society manages to concentrate all the means that people depend on to continue to live in the hands of a few and the rest of the world is forced to comply and live with the bare minimum. In such a post-capitalist world, we could safely assume (and strive to achieve) that nobody should be forced to work 12 hours a day and take another 3 hours commuting to arrive home (in case they aren’t unemployed). With that out of the way, I’m sure humanity would continue to pursue and fight for all other demands that weren’t already overcome in this world-transforming process.