Karl Marx. Capital Vol One Ch6

The buying and selling of labor power

In order to make a profit on products labor itself must be considered a commodity. It can be bought and sold. It is generally the amount needed to keep the laborer alive an able to produce the commodity he labors on.

In this way the business man owns the money. He would not consider himself a commodity but only the money he owns. The worker on the other hand is a commodity.

Karl Marx. Capital Vol One Ch5

Contradictions in the general formula for capital

Making money from money presents itself some problems. If you sell something at equal value than what you paid for it, there is no room to profit. Even if you buy a raw materials and sell the product for more than the materials, you are adding the cost of labor.

A profit does not seem possible from the circulation of commodities. You will just the equivalent back. This is good if you want to exchange a commodity but troublesome if you are expecting to make money into more money.

Marx supposes that a profit must be made within the circulation of commodities and out-side of the circulation circuitry.

Karl Marx. Capital Vol One Ch4

The general formula for capital

Marx compares two types exchanges. Money to buy a good to resell for more money (M -> C -> M) and a good to sell to buy another good (C -> M -> C).

To exchange a good for money to buy another good is based on the want of a specific thing that has definite physical attributes. When someone buys something in order to sell it at a higher price the goal is to increase an abstract value which ideally could be any number. The latter exchange is a capital exchange (exchanging money in order to receive more money).

Interest bearing capital seems to Marx to remove commodities from the calculation. Interest just boldly states that money is worth more money.

Marx also contrasts a miser to that of a capitalist. A miser saves money and withdraws money from circulation while a capitalist puts money into circulation.

But the important bit to consider is that a capitalist treats a money like a good and goods like money that is worth more than it was originally. Or at least the role money and goods play is put on their heads in a slightly perverse way.

Karl Marx. Capital Vol One Ch3 Sec3

Money

a. Hoarding

Money is a commodity and it's used to exchange goods. When it's being used it creates currency. It enables trade. But when money is horded it does not create a currant and resembles a commodity rather than a means to exchange commodities.

b. Means of payment

When a person takes on debt to purchase a good it changes the nature of money. The obvious thing it does is allow the consumer to get a good with out paying all the money for it. This will disrupt the currency of money as the buyer has to hoard money to make the cyclical payments towards his debt. The money is taken out of circulation which will reduce the current of money.

The nature of money in the case makes money the medium of contract rather than the medium to exchange goods.

Karl Marx. Capital Vol One Ch3 Sec2

The medium of circulation

a. The metamorphosis of commodities

Commodities exchange with money and that money can be exchanged for other commodities. Marx gives the example of a weaver who makes linen to convert to money to buy a bible.

Division of labor is brought up rather quickly. Since the weaver is not the sole maker of linen, the amount of gold he can exchange the linen for can only be realized when he goes to the market which will aggregate all of the linen sold and the price will be determined by the total amount of linen produced by all the weavers.

Marx rapidly notes that the relationship between the weaver's linen is quirky. The goal of the weaver is to buy a bible. He makes the linen which has value but does not barter the linen directly for the bible. He converts it to money and the money to the bible. But realistically the weaver is bartering for the bible in an extended way.

Something bought is also something that can be sold. Marx is quick to this point. The weaver now has a bible. He does not know how to make a bible but can sell it just the same as the linen he produced. And Marx spends a good amount of time on this cycle of buying and selling and then buying again.

He seems to assume that capitalism requires one to keep buying and selling one's goods. What I mean is that he said if someone purchases something for the sake of consumption, it breaks this cycle of buying and selling. This he says creates crises.

He foreshadows that type of circulation discussed so far is simplistic and as time goes on with these exchanges you will see the exchanges are not as tidy as the simplistic example. The main culprit he points to is this back and forth between physical and abstract account of a commodity.

b.

Currency is like electric current or the current of water. In Capitalism currency is the flow of buyers to sellers and sellers to buyers. The currency of commodities can go in phases when either there is a surplus of commodities or money. The rate that trade takes place also effects the currency of commodities.

c.

Gold is represented into coins and paper money. Although they may not be gold themselves they represent gold. One can not be sneaky and print more money than gold because even it the money says it represents a certain amount of gold, it will just be a ratio to the gold available.

Coins and paper money are also a good way to keep currency moving as they are meant to be exchanged quickly. Basically to be giving the slightest thought in the exchange for one commodity to another. Almost as if the money was somehow embedded in the trade itself rather than an actual thing.

Karl Marx. Capital Vol One Ch3 Sec1

The measures of values

Marx spends his time comparing money to what money symbolizes, gold. Gold is a commodity but has a special role to be a commodity of value. Money is just an abstraction of gold and is based off the weight of gold.

Marx also points out that although a commodity is priced in gold, the gold is not in the commodity (unless it's gold). So this value is abstract until you exchange it for gold.

And of course the value of a commodity is an abstraction of the labor used to take from nature and make a product that otherwise wouldn't exist. Marx also says that something that isn't a commodity can have a price but it doesn't have a value. He gives the example of a manicured field that someone can purchase for farmland. The field does not have any labor put into it yet.

Karl Marx. Capital Vol One Ch2

Exchange

Labor is the fruit of value according to Marx. This is why he sees the exchange of commodities in a negative light. Labor is a thing that constitutes social worth along with producing something to satisfy a want.

Capitalism is a practice where people use their labor to package up social part of labor and exchange it with others as if it didn't matter. The price on a product is just a false image of what value is.

Commerce also makes people who trade commodities as impersonal as the value of the commodity itself. They are just someone who holds on to abstract values to part with them in order to get an abstract value from someone else.

Near the end Marx also introduces how people gravitate towards money as a commodity itself. In a sense, being obsessed with an abstraction of an abstraction of the real thing.

Karl Marx. Capital Vol One Ch1 Sec4

THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES AND THE SECRET THEREOF

This section is a bit more opinionated than previous sections of chapter one. Marx relies less on examples that resemble equations and more examples from fiction.

Marx sees that originally man drew value from from labor. Labor emanated through many social roles such as family members. Labor was done not to produce commodities. Labor was more a way of life.

Capitalism severs this link with Labor. Commodities are produced to be exchanged for other commodities. Social roles are unimportant. Capitalists' valuation of the commodities is explained almost as it was voodoo. The way people valued products of their labor in the past was Labor, but Marx suggests the capitalists arbitrarily places value on commodities using those same instincts from the past but abstracted from Labor. This amounts to some 'franken-value'.

Karl Marx. Capital Vol One Ch1 Sec3

The Form of Value or Exchange Value

Marx gives a step by step explanation from occasional bartering to a deliberate currency of value.

Money is explained to be a commodity just like coats, fabric, and corn. The only difference is that money holds a monopoly over value.

This might be made clearer by this example. Marx theorizes about a commodity, linen, that is used to establish worth of several other commodities. But in this case linen has a utility and a monetary role.

Linen could make sense if trade was infrequent, but it gets complicated when trade is common. People could wear money. Money really is a commodity where it is meant for one purpose, to hold value.

Karl Marx. Capital Vol One Ch1 Sec2

The Twofold Character of the Labor Embodied in Commodities

Marx takes into consideration a coat and the material that makes a coat. There are two professions that are involved with this example. Weaving and Tailoring. The weaver makes the cloth and the tailor sows up a coat.

What Marx wants to point out that at a given time a coat might be twice as much as the linen involved in making it. But the EXCHANGE VALUE of the coat is not dependent on the cloth. The EXCHANGE VALUE of the coat is strictly the amount of coats available. Marx attributes this number to the efficiency of labor. So if the price of cloth goes up, but the tailors make more coats, the EXCHANGE VALUE of coats will decrease.

Karl Marx. Capital Volume One Ch1 Sec1

The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value

If Marx wants you to know one thing about capitalism, it is that it is all about commodities. The opening of the book establishes what Marx considers a COMMODITY to be.

Basic tenets of COMMODITIES:

1. It has to be human made and not taken from nature.
2. It has to be produced to be exchanged and not to be given directly to consume.

When considering COMMODITIES Marx points to two important values:

1. USE VALUE - A value to acknowledge the quantity of the commodity. It is some value linked to a physical trait either the amount of units, weight, the units of length.
2. EXCHANGE VALUE - a value used to arbitrate the ratio between the USE VALUE of two different commodities. It is not linked to any physical trait. It is just a ratio of USE VALUES.

LABOR is calculated very much like USE VALUE in that it is a number based on a trait. This is the duration of LABOR needed to produce an amount of the commodity. Marx states that when calculating LABOR in a capitalist system, it is only important to consider LABOR of the entire system. This means the total amount of LABOR used to make all the commodities exchanged.

Marx puts much emphasis on LABOR being the driving force for USE VALUE and EXCHANGE VALUE. The reason being that the more of a commodity you can make the hire the USE VALUE (remember the USE VALUE is just measurement of how much of a commodity you have). When the USE VALUE changes it effects the EXCHANGE VALUE because when you make more of something it generally decreases in value making the ratio of its value to other commodities different.

LABOR is also fluctuates in productivity for various reasons that either boost or deflate. This in turn fluctuates the EXCHANGE VALUE as commodities' USE VALUE will be going up and down.

Wall Street Protests

New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, chastised protesters on wall street claiming they are chasing away jobs from those who are employed there.

"If the jobs they are trying to get rid of in this city – the people that work in finance, which is a big part of our economy – go away, we're not going to have any money to pay our municipal employees or clean our parks or anything else."
Michael Bloomberg: Occupy Wall Street is trying to destroy jobs

But I think there is a big problem Bloomberg is missing. The protests are for that very reason. I guess the problem is why should an industry be solely responsible for municipal employees or clean parks and 'everything else'? Why aren't municipalities robust enough to finance themselves?

More and more people are losing their jobs or working long hours for low wages. A large part of wages, if one is lucky to have a job, goes to paying debt and not to support their community. And more and more people are starting to question how they have become so useless to take care of necessities.

Bloomberg's comments highlight a major problem: a person in charge of managing a municipality isn't concerned about the health of the municipality depending so much on finance rather than its citizens.

He isn't emphasizing strengthening municipalities by protecting it from industries attempting to dominate it. He's just announcing that New York is pinned.

Essentially Bloomberg's telling the protesters:

I get what you're saying but so what?

He's advocating letting the machinery of government rust even more and rely on an industry the protesters see as harmful to upkeep public infrastructure.

Why should people even feel secure public parks and employees will still be around the way things are going if wall street isn't reformed?

When a wolf comes huffing and puffing, it's good not to build your house out of straw or sticks. If you build it out of bricks then it's no problem. Unfortunately the way we've been treating municipalities and government is to build them as cheaply as possible while hiring the big bad wolf to personally over see their construction. And politicians are just broadcasters of this message instead of getting out the bricks and mortar.

Of course politicians do not get elected by giving speeches of what they personally think. Much of their actions and words simply mimic what argument the public finds most attractive. It will take consistent pressure by the public and a nack to side step attempts to obscure the message to see civility take hold of system of brutes.

In order to be effect the wall street protesters have to be persuasive that this is persistent and it is an itch that will be scratched until it goes away.

Artificial Intellegence

Watson, the computer designed to play Jeopardy!, has people talking about whether computers will ever be able to think like humans do. The actuality of that happening is unlikely.

One thing about human thinking is that it's fused with function. While recalling trivia for a game show, our brains monitor our heart beat and makes sure we are breathing. Thinking isn't much different. Although they may not seem so, thoughts are geared to monitor our environment and make sure we take care of the necessities of life. When we are are hungry we think a lot about food, when we are on a trivia game show, we think a lot about trivia.

Watson was designed to answer questions for the sake of answering questions. Humans learn answers not for the sake answering questions. There is a benefit to having knowledge. It shapes how we make decisions. Presumably you can make better decisions while knowing many alternatives and the likely outcomes. But we set aside trivial pursuits when the situation calls for it. Watson doesn't monitor power plants and recognize there will be a power shortage. If asked a question he would not answer, "The power will go out in the next 5 minutes, I see no point in answering this question. I'm just going to take the rest of the time I have to enjoy myself."

Watson was designed to be a tool. It's a computer to achieve what humans cannot achieve with their own abilities. It's designed to replicate the fruits of human thought without an understanding of what thoughts are. A computer can be designed to play Jeopardy! but can it be designed to be human? I think not.

There could not be a bigger travesty of a statement other than, "I think there fore I am." It's rhetorically splashy but bound with error. Thinking allows us to think about being but doesn't cause it. Thinking is not always advantageous or necessary. It is something humans do but it might not be what a living thing made of silicon wafers needs to survive. It is dear to humans, but why do we act like everything is jealous that cannot think?

Brevity

Describing things can be hazardous. A long-winded description will be close to the actual thing. At some point it becomes better just to witness the thing in itself rather than put it into language.

A description that is too brief will be unsatisfactory since the description is too weak to imagine without the actual thing in front of you. The reason why it should be put into language is incomplete.

The saying by William Shakespeare, "brevity is the soul of wit" seems to contain this train of thought. An intelligent description is a balance between not knowing what to say thus saying everything and not saying enough thus exchanging no idea at all.

Memory

What is memory? When you take account of how small your head is and how much information it can contain, the validity of this information is suspect. A newly recalled memory is often like recalling a dream.

After all, what would our dreams be without memory? This land that is our own private land that we charge up with symbols and feelings during the day. But this does not say what memory is.

So again, what is memory? Do we really save memories in these long detailed accounts? Do we have scribes in our brains?

I think the answer can be discovered easy enough. The act of remembering should reveal what happens if you examine it close enough. Most often memory starts with a pang. This is a flash of something. It is a beginning, or more accurately, a point.

This point is brought out of memory. We think about that point in the present using our minds to logically create a story. To draw the memory out. We don't store anything but this point in our head. We don't need to. All we need is the beginning and we fill it in afterwards.

Our memories depend on our thinking like math equations are. The answer to the equation does not need to be stored. To save space, all we need are some clues and then since we contain the ability to do math, we solve the puzzle with some time. Variables are not constant. We can adjust when something becomes different.

Or memories are often shifting. Things from childhood must be recalculated. Memories would be no good to us if we could not shape them in the present. They would be like wearing clothes we wore in childhood. They'd be too small and out of style and capable of tearing apart so they can't be worn.

Devided Government

Americans are often depicted as being suspicious of government. One way Americans medicate this itch is to slow down the government by creating competition between the two dominant parties.

Republicans and Democrats behave as in a sporting event. Each legislation passed is like a point. Regardless of what the legislation is or what it was proposed to do, the two parties aim to score the maximum amount of points themselves while keeping their opponent at a minimum.

When Americans want to render the powers of government impotent, they vote the parties in power so each has about equal representation. The government is rushed into inaction by the parties vehemently competing with each other.

But fierce competition is not the only way to cause inaction. It is probably the least desirable cause of inaction because it creates low quality agendas and legislation.

But what are the alternatives? How can we slow down an eager government without wasting so much energy creating needless opposition? How do we avoid parties opposing legislation that itself was proposed by the other party to be oppositional?

I will propose one method. It is a time honored tradition used by the countless intellectual beings through out human history. Thought. Thinking is the thief of action. If we want government to slow down, why not structure the government so that the intensity of thought needed to pass legislation is raised. The result of this would create laws that were enacted slowly yet well thought out. It seems to me an infinitely more advantageous way than laws enacted when two parties scratch at each other's jugular, only to pass laws when one party loses focus while finding a new ways to maim their opponent.

Why don't we as a collective society choose laws of intellect rather than laws of base, competitive tomfoolery?