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.