I love these. Keep going sir, we are beating the "nonpolitical" and "purely scientific" economists at their own rules.
@MidwesternMarx
3 ай бұрын
That’s what Marx did with classical Pol-Econ. Now Cockshott is extending the Marxist analysis to a critique of neoclassical econ.
@maximmatusevich3971
3 ай бұрын
@@MidwesternMarx Can you get Osiris back for round 3? Loved the first 2.
@strega1380
3 жыл бұрын
one of the most valuable channels for a communist youth
@ogas_cybernetics1295
3 жыл бұрын
I'll show this to everyone who will listen it is so important to educate my fellow college students on the source of anticommunist sentiment
@felixlipski3956
3 жыл бұрын
"Well, he lived before Google..."
@racim.boussa
3 жыл бұрын
"if you don't believe it walk into Chernobyl"
@felixlipski3956
3 жыл бұрын
@@racim.boussa you've cut the best part that is right after that
@profjoaoluizpacheco2471
3 жыл бұрын
KKKKKKKK it was so natural!
@Achrononmaster
Жыл бұрын
@9:23 "... well,... he lived before Google." So deadpan, that was hilarious Sir. 👏
@pedrocavalcante5822
3 жыл бұрын
why do bourgeois economists call themselves "non-political" and "scientific" all the time? it's a doubt that I have.
@peternyc
3 жыл бұрын
@Pedro Cavalcante, 19th century "economists" wanted to remove morality from political economy. They did so by rejecting the labor theory of value, and by removing land from the factors of production, making it part of what is called capital. The rejection of the labor theory of value and its replacement by subjectivity in the form of "demand," creates a system that is artificial and removed from the needs and wants of people. The new artificial system only considers the needs and wants of "capital" which means when you hear an 'economist' talk of demand, you should interpret his/her statements as a reflection of the needs of capital for revenue and profits. This is the real meaning of demand, as opposed to the conventional meaning, which is that demand is the desire and ability of people (labor) to consume, which is dependent on their 'purchasing power,' meaning their ability to spend their disposable income. The conventional understanding of demand puts the foundation of this artificial system on the shoulders of working people, not on the ruling class. It makes it seem as though the social-organization we have is bottom up, when in fact it is top down. Demand for revenue and profits must be met by the "supply" of purchases by people (consumers). When this supply is not met, then revenue decreases and eventually needs to be rescued by government and central banks. We all experience this today, and can see how blatant and shamelessly the government/central banks do this. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the working class. This insane injustice happens daily and mostly in plain sight, kind of like when a tiger crouches at the side of a pond in full view of the antelopes that are drinking, all of them fully aware that the tiger will eat one of them. The artificial system people conflate with something inescapable, like evolution, is justified culturally by patriarchal religion which says in a nutshell that social class is created by god, and work is the only salvation. The Protestant Work Ethic brings this to a feverish pitch. Owners of income producing property are exempt from the harsh conditions of life by virtue of their property, blood-line, and so forth. In this culture, conspicuous consumption is a signal that you or your family have "worked" hard enough to have the things that would otherwise be wasteful. Here, what should be sin is virtue. The decadent civilization in Mel Gibson's movie, Apocalypto, shows this explicitly. The next is land. Land (and natural resources and monopolies) are how wealth is maintained and grown. Land is not productive, yet its use fetches rent for the owner. Speculation on its price allows the wealthy to buy and sell for what is always a profit. Excess profits from individuals and corporations are always sunk into land. The movie "The Founder," about Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's shows how this works. In a nutshell, property taxes generally are split between a tax on the land and a tax on the building on the land. The building is the product of effort by a person, the land is the product of nature or god, certainly not the product of a person. Taxes are almost always skewed so that they fall mostly on the buildings and not on the land. The net effect is that productive enterprise is penalized, and extractive speculation is rewarded. In a sane (capitalist) world, taxes would be completely on land and would be zero for any productive activity that is the result of labor, such as building. The lower the taxes are on land, the higher the price of that land and the greater the loan a bank is able to make to buyers. Banks are major lobbyists in creating the skewed land/building tax codes in the world. If the tax on land were 100% of the value of the land itself, then the price of the land would go to zero and the banking industry would all but collapse, since 80% of bank loans in the U.S. are for home mortgages and 80% of those loans are for homes that already exist. Under such a tax scheme, banks would be forced to lend for productive purposes only, and not for speculation. This is the form of capitalism that should have become the norm at the end of the 19th century. We would all probably be socialist countries by now, and well on our way to Marx's idea of communism if capitalism had taken this turn. In the movie The Founder, Ray Kroc was in debt to banks yet his McDonald's franchises were booming. He couldn't figure out why. A man listening to Kroc beg a banker for a loan extension told Kroc that his mistake was in thinking he was in the hamburger business. He wasn't. He was in the real estate business but didn't know it. From that moment on, Kroc bought land and rented it to the franchisees. His buildings were one story high, avoiding property taxes on buildings and paying low taxes on the land. McDonald's, and all other fast food restaurants are landlords. The specific things they sell to the public are not the source of their wealth beyond a certain point. The land is. When a community decides to improve its infrastructure, what happens to the land value of the surrounding area? It goes up. Who pays for the infrastructure build? The taxpayers do - working people. Who owns the land rises in value? The capitalists do, and they buy the land well in advance after buying the politicians first. The entire process is done over bourbon and cigars. Improving land value by creating infrastructure is like transforming an ugly gulch into beach front property. The land value spikes and the owners profit by either selling high, or by renting. Meanwhile, tax coffers are dry and politicians force us into austerity and bare knuckles competition with each other. This sets the stage for intra-class warfare, fueled by identity politics and culture wars. We should be waging inter-class warfare, between the working class and the capital-owning class. Instead we fight over straw-man issues of identity and culture. Anyway, sorry to write so much. Economics is a fake science, predicated on the private ownership of the means of production. Without that private ownership, society would own the means of production collectively, and the task would not be "economic" but one of logistics and engineering. This is why Paul Cockshot's efforts are so on target. His understanding of computational math is the knowledge and skill socialism didn't have generations ago. I realize you probably know this, because you are watching his video, but I thought I'd say it anyway just for formality's sake. The 19th century saw Malthusian economics and its Siamese-twin, Darwin's Theory of Evolution emerge. Both ideas are joined at the hip. Both absolutely negate any role of cooperation in the history of the human race or in its future. The both assume that we are doomed to sadistic greed and gladiator fights in the form of competition, whether in economics or in the realm of courtship and marriage. Stephen Jay Gould, an American evolutionary biologist wrote an article on the 19th century biologist Peter Kropotkin, who is/was one of the main thinkers in anarchist theory. I really recommend it (not trying to take the focus away from Marx). Here's the link: www.marxists.org/subject/science/essays/kropotkin.htm Just to inform you: the ideas I wrote about on land come from the American economist Henry George, who wrote Progress & Poverty in 1879. Had we done what George had said we should do, we would probably all be socialist by now. Neoclassical economists can only succeed if they fool you into thinking that capitalism is inevitable. They must control what options are on the table at all times. There are certain lines of questioning they can't allow. The media and related institutions make sure all information is cleansed and sanitized for general use. Only by questioning at the level of the factors of production will we all learn what to ask and what is a reasonable answer.
@maximmatusevich3971
3 жыл бұрын
@@peternyc Wait, so if land is taxed at 100% how would it be purchased for houses for example. Or if you need to sell/buy a house how would that turn out?
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
@@maximmatusevich3971 The Georgists proposed 100% tax on land revenue - rent, not on the land itself.
@maximmatusevich3971
3 жыл бұрын
@@paulcockshott8733 So land could not be rented, only sold or developed?
@peternyc
3 жыл бұрын
@@maximmatusevich3971 Sorry, I didn’t see your questions about land. In theory, the idea is to tax the land (not the physical capital on the land - like buildings) at 100% of the land value, which means that the price of the land would go to zero. This would then render banks incapable of lending towards land, which would force them to lend for productive purposes only. As of 2015, 80% of bank loans in the US were for mortgages and 80% of those loans were for homes that were already built. No one was employed as a result of these loans. They were speculative loans. The real estate market is set by banks. The price ceiling is determined by the banks, not the buyers. The price is determined by what a bank is willing to lend. With a 100% LVT (land value tax), there is no price left to lend against. What the Georgists don’t understand (and the Marxists do) is that American imperialism will never allow an LVT to become a law at the national level. Empire is about currency, banking, payments, and military. Land is a principal form of collateral against which new money is created. It’s the keystone in the imperialist edifice. But to answer your question, the land could be leased with the heavy obligation to use the land to its fullest and highest purpose by building up. A Georgist world would deregulate capital improvements like buildings so that the land owner or leaseholder could rent out the new structures to pay the LVT. Any profits on top of the LVT would go to the owner/leaseholder. The LVT is meant to be the only tax in the land. The expression Georgists used was The Single Tax: no income tax, no sales tax, no other taxes at all. Today the idea is expanded to include heavy taxation on all forms of rent and monopoly. To put this in real terms, the US is a parasitic rentier wealth extracting criminal that really doesn’t do much except bully the world. China, on the other hand, is investing in the Belt & Road project. Think of it: laying infrastructure all around the planet, increasing the value of the land in proximity to that development and all capable of paying for itself by levying an LVT. The people benefit from the infrastructure, communities and businesses prospering, and all of it paying for itself. The US is furious, because the only thing it “does” is print dollars. The US empire can’t exist if the rest of the world doesn’t need to invest in dollars or receive dollar loans. The rest of the world sends its surplus dollars to Wall Street to buy US Treasuries, which fund the US budget deficit and its military. Now, with the Belt & Road and other ventures, surplus dollars can be used for productive investment that will be guaranteed to fetch returns. Sorry to ramble.
@montagekurt8531
3 жыл бұрын
What we also need to know: The many branches of the Austrian School are not economics at all. They do not even claim to be able to study and explain macroeconomics, but rather reject macroeconomics. They don't even have a uniform concept and are not considered scientific. In addition, there are many logical breaks in their theory, as well as empirical / experiential refutations in practice. So they have - apart from a few refuted theories about money - no macroeconomics at all. The Austrian school only examines tiny aspects of microeconomics. That is, extremely limited sub-markets in primitive models. It means : Even in the small economics area of the submarkets, the Austrian school offers extremely little. Although this little is often worded in an intelligent, simple and understandable way. You have to praise them. The simple, understandable communication makes them so popular with economically less educated people. Everyday psychological experiences are mixed with a few primitive market-economy observations from the pre-industrial era and naive people think they have now understood the economy. Because of the many logical breaks in their theories, there are divisions between the various groups inside various generations that are mutually exclusive. And most branches now recognize the objective theory of values. Yes: There is such an unscientific confusion with them that four different generations, i.e. lines, formed very early on. And that, although their gurus get along well. The offer function in the O (ffer) -D (emand) functions is taught openly as a COST function in every normal vocational, commercial school / university. Hardly anyone believes the subjective doctrine of values even among them. On the contrary, meanwhile the labor value theory is playing an increasingly important role in some of their sects. Since wages are an important cost factor within the supply function. That is why they always complain so strongly against wage increases and higher minimum wages. The Austrian concept of subjective value is and was already unscientific because it assumed something occult, metaphysical, existing outside of reality and not measurable. Therefore, their explanations are very psychological and often take on religious features of a human image. Religious, because in their sick minds the lazy is punished by God with poverty and the hard-working is rewarded by God with wealth. As with fascists, a very elitist distinction is made between valuable and unworthy lives. These “libertarians” do not know unemployment because, according to their logic, an unemployed person simply starves to death. The Hayeks, Mises, Friedmans ...hate especially organized and striking workers. That is why they loved the fascist torture state of Chile so much. The libertarians have nothing against owning huge means of production and multibillionaires. These people who despise people therefore need a brutal state or private security apparatus, since only this can guarantee the right to property.
@UltraRik
2 жыл бұрын
No austrian would say 'hard-work will be rewarded', i surely hope not. hard work is worthless. As an unemployed libertarian idk how I'm not starving to death I have zero bad feelings about worker organization, because as a libertarian I like something called freedom of association. I'm not a fan of old Chilean government, or any government. I kinda wish US left them alone so we could have a good empirical test of leftist cybernetics to look at. As for value theories they're all unscientific. They all root axioms in occult ethereal constructs. Value is a verb anyway, there's no thing called 'value' to point to. You can measure quantities of energy, products, labor, anything, and show how it relates to various other things, but there is no way to construct a basket of inputs and declare it some universal cardinal quantity of 'value', without it being arbitrary and dependant upon the goals you are trying to achieve by doing so (maximising x over y). I'm a Hayekian, not necessarily austrian, but to me it seems most of your views of austrian thinkers are wildly incorrect. I regularly interact with many austrians, tho many of them are dogmatic zealots, your analysis of their ideas is just wrong, most of them would never use the arguments you claim they would.
@dsafindom
Жыл бұрын
@@UltraRik Marx deboonked by value being a verb
@shannonm.townsend1232
9 ай бұрын
Itoo, would have liked to see if Chilean cyber-socialism could have succeeded (or not) if it had not been trammled by the West. There's some old Firing Line episodes with various CIA Chilean assets, their handlers and Chicago Boys, that seem particularly unsettling, even ghoulish with the weight of history and hindsight.
@noidontlikeu
3 жыл бұрын
You're doing a great public service with these videos
@huntsman8787
3 жыл бұрын
Great video. Can't wait for the mathematical one. Also, what level of mathematics (Calculus, Linear algebra etc) will be required in order to properly understand the critique?
@BlingSco
3 жыл бұрын
You're talking ideally A-LEVEL MATHS and Futher maths probably.
@PiotrChlebowski
3 жыл бұрын
Good thing scientific progress has a way of proving those libertarians wrong.
@maximmatusevich3971
3 жыл бұрын
I sometimes fantasize about being a libertarian because it would probably mean that I am rich (have money + means of production -> support libertarianism). However when bad things happen, those libertarians quickly change their beliefs. Like when the Koch Bros's father ran away to the USSR in 1929 because he was afraid other oil capitalists would sue him for developing a new method of oil refining.
@CHector1997
3 жыл бұрын
It can be proved with "old school" arguments though !
@maximmatusevich3971
3 жыл бұрын
@Karl Marx Who? Mises and Hayek? They're like the ideological protagonists of right wing libertarianism.
@waterbird2686
3 жыл бұрын
I hate when Libertarianism is confused with capitalism there are socialist libertarians too it's an ideology of individual liberty some just consider the free market to be more libertarian
@GeorgWilde
3 жыл бұрын
@@maximmatusevich3971 "those libertarians quickly change their beliefs" - Being libertarian depends solely on beliefs. So someone who isn't libertarian (anymore) doesn't rerepsent lbiertarianism. Of course what you cal a capitalist (the rich businessmen) has nothing to do with whether that person understand capitalism or believes in libertarianism. Get your logical structure together or be called out for obscuring the truth.
@smhsophie
2 жыл бұрын
Watching this again. This is a great palette cleanser after seeing Unlearning Economics' video about worker co-ops.
@peternyc
3 жыл бұрын
The role of subjectivity in Austrian economics seems similar to that in Post Modernism. It can't be disproved.
@blackywhite647
3 жыл бұрын
Some Austrians with Dr./Phd say really that socialism comes from the devil and capitalism from god. And god will support and reward the capitalists. I think that only an exorcist can help the austrians.
@LibertarianLeninistRants
3 жыл бұрын
I'd be interested to know what stage of interdisciplinarity you deem necessary for modern scientific socialism? Is it just enough to study one subject (computer science, economics, history,...) or is it necessary to learn more methods than are taught in just one subject?
@maximmatusevich3971
3 жыл бұрын
This is an excellent question. I say you need interdisciplinary knowledge to improve cognitive potential but you cannot use just one method because then your cognitive abilities become ossified and you lose flexibility. Besides what is the source of your knowledge? If it's mainstream then you will be stuck knowing only what you are allowed to know. I suggest the book Debunking Economics 2nd Ed. by Steve Keen as an eye opener if you took mainstream econ.
@racim.boussa
3 жыл бұрын
i don't know if it's besides your point, but when you do a Masters in let's say engineering you get enough knowledge to transition into anything . my point is when you do some engineering stuff you spend the first few years just thinking about how reality is and how to model it, using physics and maths stuff, i think knowing fourrier transforms, Shannon's theorem, knowing what entropy is made understanding the economic debates really simpler for me.
@NevetsTSmith
3 жыл бұрын
>he lived before google You have me cackling, Paul.
@peternyc
3 жыл бұрын
Austrian theory and monetarist theory also reify money. The need to transact, buy and sell, are assumed by the Austrians specifically, and to monetarists generally. They can't imagine a society where individuals don't seek to "nickel and dime" each other.
@johnlowrie6456
3 жыл бұрын
Is there any evidence that Hayekian subjectivism informs the actions of capitalist companies/ For example, if Walmart give an order to a company for say 10,000 of a new style of coffee table to be delivered in a specific time perio., then the company have to buy the required quantity of the requisite wood at the prevailing market price, i.e an objective condition.
@dempa3
3 жыл бұрын
Thank you for another very interesting video! Looking forward to the next! I would like to ask again about the issue of storage mentioned in the previous video. A 4 Terabytes (4000 gigabytes) hard drive costs probably less than 100 pounds. Why would such storage be inaccessible? Or is it assumed that one "consumes" one of those hard drives after every calculation to the results? Additionally I can add that in a very well stocked grocery store (where I live) there might be up to 100 000 different types of goods, counting, say for example different flavours of potato chips and different brands as different goods. Additionally, one can estimate that other types of goods like clothes, electronics, furniture, household items, etc, might be more than 3 million. I imagine that in the UK you have even more different goods. And here I do not have any data on the intermediary goods, used to produce these end consumer goods. Therefore I suspect that the calculations would need to deal with several million items more.
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
The access time to disk is several orders of magnitude slower than main memory. If you can shift data to main memory you get an enourmous speedup. I might one day do a video on the technique I patented to speed up relational databases by factors of a thousand doing this.
@dempa3
3 жыл бұрын
@@paulcockshott8733 That would be a very interesting subject for a video! Do you mean then 4000 Gigabytes of RAM? I must admit that I haven't seen processors that support that much RAM. Then again, if one would truly calculate a plan for the whole economy, one probably has the means to have a machine built for this specific task. SSDs are of course not nearly as fast as RAM, but significantly faster than HDDs. A 4000 Gigabyte SSD probably costs around 400 pounds, which is of course not a small amount of money, but not inaccessible either.
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
@@dempa3 There exist machines plenty big enough to do even the non-sparse matrix planning see this : www.nextplatform.com/2021/02/10/a-sneak-peek-at-chinas-sunway-exascale-supercomputer/
@dempa3
3 жыл бұрын
@@paulcockshott8733 Seems like you will have to promote your Patreon a bit more frequently! :) Jokes aside a supercomputer like this is of course something a rich nation can afford (1.8 billion yuan). With a super computer boasting petabytes 1.25 of memory would allow then for 17 million products with non-sparse matrix calculation. Maybe that is closer to what the UK economy requires, with all intermediate products taken in consideration. Can one from the amount of Flops estimate the time required for the calculation?
@nguyenquangminh4814
3 жыл бұрын
Edifying as always sir
@racim.boussa
3 жыл бұрын
"if you don't believe it walk into Chernobyl" def gonna usi e abusi this one...
@eddypitono4995
3 жыл бұрын
Hi mr. Paul, do you have video critiquing JM keynes? I wanna see your take in that one.
@PoliticalEconomy101
3 жыл бұрын
Can you make a video highlighting the basic arguments as to why your input/output planning is superior to other types of planning and as to why it is the best planning to achieve socialist goals?
@shannonm.townsend1232
9 ай бұрын
Brilliant; i love your channel.
@karimmoop9560
3 жыл бұрын
"Austrian school" or BEIC school of economics? Subjective value 's phillosphical roots come into being with Jeremy Bentham with his defenses of Usury, then developed into what we see now. very intresting, but Britain and Austria-Hungary share alot of intellecutal traditions with eachother, if Karl Popper were to be born anywhere else it would be the UK.
@peternyc
3 жыл бұрын
I really look forward to watching your video you mention around the 15:25 mark, "Commodity Production and the Subject." Capitalist society is most certainly a legal construct that is based on the right of the subject to own. What follows is the law of property and contracts. There is a book put out recently, titled The Code of Capital, by Katharina Pistor, that might be useful. I haven't read it, and as a warning I'll say that it comes highly recommended by my liberal friends who think Marx is not the answer, but their description of the book seems appealing nonetheless.
@krzysztofbroda5376
3 жыл бұрын
Dear doctor, Is it possible to have direct labour accounting in a market socialist economy? Without it coops who assemble and sell finished goods to consumers could make profits disproportianately larger than their share in total manhours of production, thus exploiting those who manufacture the parts.
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
No. market socialism is a form of commodity producing economy and unless labour is performed as part of a plan you can only have monetary calculation. This is the essence of Marx's critique of Proudhon in Poverty of Philosophy.
@krzysztofbroda5376
3 жыл бұрын
@@paulcockshott8733 regarding my comment i have another thought. Since we have empirical evidence that labour theory of value is true we can assume that even in a market socialist economy the income will be corresponding to manhours put forth. Therefore a market socialism will meet the requirement of "to each according to their contribution". I am aware of your criticism of market socialism as prone to reverting back to capitalism due to unemployment, but i believe a sort of mixed socialism with state enterprises mass hiring to minimize unemployment and laws against outsourcing labour is the most "introducable" system. Once a mass movement of worker coops is developed hiring a significant percentage of workers, the public opinion will be much more symphathetic towards outlawing private ownership of means of production. And nobody should oppose minimizng unemployment as it reduces taxation/redistribution which will appeal even to the selfish minded. I am gearing up to start a worker coop in metal casting, hopefully helping others do the same
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
@@krzysztofbroda5376 Coops are a good transitional stage in the struggle against capital, but should not be seen as a stable socialist form, especially at a time when massive industrial restructuring is needed for the environmental crisis.
@CHector1997
3 жыл бұрын
Why didn't I discover you before !
@pugorod3050
3 жыл бұрын
nice
@jefersonlemos4135
Жыл бұрын
It seems that Hayek is actually selective about which natural or social phenomena. For instance natural phenomena such as astronomical formations or the billions of interactions and information exchange in biological systems also involve considerable computation for comprehension and by no means are understood by the individual scientist, furthermore theories like general relativity were culmination of long scientific development, not simply a pure matter of individual enterprise. Conversely not every social or economic problems are equal and there is varied escope, such as from a small group of people to billions, or from a simple organization to the organization of a country or geopolitical
@fg786
3 жыл бұрын
13:35 Of course it was a marvelous example of capitalist coordination. The market forces coordinated a lot of people out of payed labour, saving billions of $ payed to them by capitalists. "Making profits" was saved that way. And making profits is the sole purpose of this system, it is the one goal above all, every other thing we can do has to bow down and wait to be fulfilled. Prerequisite is, that it has to generate enough profit. Don't measure capitalism on goals you attribute to it or you wish it would fulfill. Measure it by what it is about. In that sense capitalism is working fine, because the sole purpose is to turn a profit. That there are bad outcomes for billions of people doesn't bother any apologet of the market. Austrians/libertarians are especially nonchalant in arguing them away by attirbuting them to bad politics. This channel is all I ever wanted. One place where someone is talking about how an alternative economy would work that is not relying on money and what the usual economist thinks and why it is bs.
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
But Hayek was wanting to argue against socialist planning. In so doing he could not take the internal goals of the capitalists, as sufficient justification.He had at least to pretend to a more universal justification.
@fg786
3 жыл бұрын
@@paulcockshott8733 Do you know of some real criticism of Marx' Capital from someone who has actually read the 3 volumes and beyond? Someone who really dove into it. I would love to read this. I don't think that Mises and Hayek ever read something from Marx. I remember reading Mises' Nationalökonomie (couldn't find the english title) and he waves away with Marx in one succinct sentence. It's like people today read the Communist Manifesto and think they know it all.
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
@@fg786 Steedman certainly has read Marx, and is a critic. Heinrich has also read him thoroughly and is, to some extent a critic of some aspects of Marx. I get the impression that Samuelson had also read him.
@comrademartinofrappuccino
2 жыл бұрын
Could you fix the humming in the background? I hear it constantly add it is very distracting
@paulcockshott8733
2 жыл бұрын
Does it occur on the most recent videos? I suspect it was digitisation noise due to using a low powerd little machine to grab sound and video simultaneously on my earlier videos.
@comrademartinofrappuccino
2 жыл бұрын
@@paulcockshott8733 How recent are we talking? I checked "introduction to towards new socialism" and "Purchasing power and ..." no humming in those 2 videos at all
@bing4126
3 жыл бұрын
you believe in genetics? i guess your not Lysenkopilled.
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
Of course I do.
@BlingSco
3 жыл бұрын
I think you're walking into dangerous territory when you separate information from matter. I would agree that information is objective as is all things are in a mono-materialist world. But sometimes, people can get lost in the division between the knowledge sphere of things (epistemology) and the nature of things (ontological). You cannot have information within itself, a bit on a computer exists as a physical transistor with a stored charge or lack of, which makes what epistemologically you'd call a "zero" or "one" for the sake of brevity for computer memory. And with the CPU, whether its transistor lets or doesn't let the current through for brevity sake we call "one" and "zero". In the nature of things no such "one" or "zero" exists as some kind of symbol ontology of things. Rather a complex causal engine in motion is what the computer is. Now for sure, if we are careful yes, things have information in the sense that they have various physical properties, topological, matter-config, temperature, geometry etc etc. Which defines the object in the nature of things, as such as such if we are very careful we can call these characteristics of this matter configuration and properties of this object "information". All too often,I find people using "information" and "information theory" to justify dualism or objective idealism (I'll call this informationalism). The most grossest crimes in that respect come from various quantum mechanical interpretations, in recent times. Of course given the fact that the development of information theory and information theory (in respect to entropy) came from close study of computers and machines like the telegram. Trying to use minimal resources for maximum output. We can see where the waters can get muddy in this respect; as we are dealing with something that is basically particularly with computers an extremely primitive intelligence or cognitive machine, humans being the most qualitatively developed biological and cognition machine in that respect. Given that (in respect to a computer) the whole foundation of it is codified; in even the matter structure of transistors at its lowest level in the CPU comes from study of our forms of thoughts (logic the science/philosophy of the study of forms of thoughts) ie logic gates XOR, OR, NOT, AND etc. So with such a tight connection with ourselves, we can see why people think information is something humans produce (or is subjective), because in a narrow sense, our devices for recording information (by altering their matter configs) you could also call embedded cognition. Have only been made by us. The pen and paper is something made by us, all information technology is made by us. But I guess the key thing is, we are mearly harnessing natures forces for our own ends (and we too our governed by those forces). That the information technology and the scientific theories we discover about them, ie information theory were just us humans with our sphere of activities discovering (epistemology wise) the true and ever expanding knowledge about how the true nature of things are (ontology wise). Information theory however abstract, is what that is doing. It is just one of those subjects where the overlap between ontology and epistemology is so tight it leaves people very confused. To paraphrase an anon person "some people confuse the box's edge with what is inside the box and what is outside of it".
@KrupyFren
3 жыл бұрын
The best argument against those too eager idealists is to show them the concept in the video and in fact the video on "Explaining Materialism 3: Purpose and entropy" is the go-to argument. The only reason for any supposed matter and information separation is out of pure convenience to describe information entropy in bits or Shannon's units (H = - SUM p_i log p_i) and thermodynamic entropy in Joules per Kelvin (S = k_b log W). Paul Cockshott clearly tells us how the two entropies relate to each other by showing that Landauer's heat of destroying one bit of information is kT ln(2), which is the absolute thermodynamical limit that a theoretical AND gate would need of energy to calculate Y = A.B, one bit from two ANDed input bits. And that in systems of discrete particles in energy states, the S = - k_b SUM p_i log p_i which directly puts together the models of information entropy and models of physical entropy together by Boltzmann constant. In equation k_B * H = S.
@seedee3d
3 жыл бұрын
tldr
@BlingSco
3 жыл бұрын
@@seedee3d You're too lazy and I couldn't care less 👍
@johnlowrie6456
3 жыл бұрын
'' @UCGWqcwNwzGE-J0vklURv5uw ''If the entrepreneur succeeds in selling 800 devices out of the 1,000, then this 800 is assigned value, but not through the production, but through the buyers in the market. When buyers fully replace the cost of the 800 devices and pay even more, there is surplus value too.'' Rainer slides from the correct thesis that a capitalist who produces 1000 devices that do not sell has failed to produce any value to conflating the production of value with its realisation. Let us analyse his own example: given a rate of surplus value of 100% let us assume the capitalist produces 1000 gadgets each at £1 to give a market value of £1000. Unless one adheres to the fallacy of Senior's last hour, we see that if 600c 200 v 200s then each item embodies .6c .2 v .2 s. But if the capitalist sells only 800 he realises only his costs of production 800x£1 = £800 and no surplus value whatsoever.. If she sells 900 she realises 100s. How about the remaining 100? As happens the capitalist would probably reduce the price below the market price, say, to 50p or alternatively if there were a sudden dearth she might raise it above the prevailing market price, thus realising more surplus labour than is actually embodied in the commodity.
@Achrononmaster
Жыл бұрын
Nice lecture. But in addition to your arguments there is now abundant empirical evidence Austrian School/libertarians are just wrong. The trouble is the _entire economics profession_ (other than MMT and some PK'ers) refuses to study data seriously, and curve fit so their model always matches the data regardless. The Austrians tend to get around empirical rigour by not even bothering with mathematical models, so have nothing to curve fit except stories. Apologies for the over-generalizations implied - but if you are an Austrian and have a good model tell me about it! lol. You will not have as good a model as I have because you refuse to admit macroeconomics is a thing. You refuse to model governments as currency monopolies.
@vibhuvikramaditya4576
2 жыл бұрын
If economic information is not subjective, how do we objectively find about people's tastes and preferences, and the future, currently non-existing plans of consumption
@berntengdahl1519
2 жыл бұрын
You can guess what a person's preferences are based on their behavior. If a person eats lots of bananas, that is reason to believe that he likes bananas. And if a plan of consumption is not existing, there's obviosly no way to know about it. You can't investigate the properties of a nonexisting thing.
@vibhuvikramaditya4576
2 жыл бұрын
@@berntengdahl1519 people are not hyper rational to plan every consumption that they undertake,
@berntengdahl1519
2 жыл бұрын
@@vibhuvikramaditya4576 I have no idea what you're talking about. Please use proper english spelling and grammar.
@rainerlippert
2 жыл бұрын
Hi there, You are right! The classic interpreters of Marx's Labor Theory of Value (better Value Theory) try to objectify value, i.e. to make it independent of human consciousness processes. But it doesn't work, it can't work. Value is a social relationship. Such is developed between people and it only works (!) between people, not in objects, not between people and objects. Social relationships do not work between people between their muscles, but between their consciousness processes. Value is a social relationship between seller and buyer. It is based on ownership and weighted needs for the goods that are not freely available. As a social relationship, value must have subjective parts, but also an objective one. The objective part has to be there because the value goes beyond the individual subject and works between people - on the societal level. The objective share of value is the common value that buyer and seller agree on. This becomes visible and effective for third parties - in the purchase contract or on the invoice, when paying VAT, possibly when paying insurance policies, etc. In the bazaar, buyers and sellers come to an agreement through dialogue, in the department store through the unilateral adaptation of the buyer to the seller's views. If there is no agreement, there is no exchange - the invoice cannot contain a sales price and a different purchase price. Both can have value views that deviate from this common value, but they are not socially relevant, one-sided and not part of a relationship. If a producer produces 1,000 cars and can only sell 800 of them, a value is created for these 800 cars, but not for the remaining 200. This is also the case according to Marx, because the work expended on the 200 cars was not socially useful and therefore not value forming. Also, it's likely that the car salesman can't sell all the cars at the same price - there's likely to be varying amounts of surplus value - from very high to negative. The subjective part of the value is also expressed through the last-mentioned phenomena.
@scobo7497
9 ай бұрын
Subjetivism as catholic credo, agreed. Old jesuitic ideology actually
@slightlygruff
3 жыл бұрын
So what did you son say about Scottish math carriculum?
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
I will try to phone him
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
He said yes, they covered matrix algebra in school, but not of courser Leontief economics.
@lucascarvalho7191
2 жыл бұрын
read joseph kane ( catolic university america ) economics flaws in computized socialism refuted the video argument
@GeorgWilde
3 жыл бұрын
How can the concept of subject be a religious belief without any subjects to hold any beliefs? Only way to avoid a blatant contradiction is to suppose that i didn't experience watching this video at all because experience is subjective and thus impossible. So this video cannot be evaluated and is ultimately meaningless. Or you can claim that this is a dialetheia and that we must actually reason paraconsistently (contradiction doesn't entail everything), but good luck with holding such an unorthodox philosophical view.
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
Check it out. Even philosophers didnt talk about subjects till the bourgeois revolution. Why do you think it requires bourgeois legal categories for animals to be conscious? Concious animals long predated these bourgeois categories.
@GeorgWilde
3 жыл бұрын
@@paulcockshott8733 I have seen the video (before i wrote the initial comment). But according to you, i cannot be a subject and you are not a subject. So how can we make sense about who thinks and believes what? It doesn't matter to you, right? You just want society to mechanically process the output of your theories. "Why do you think it requires bourgeois legal categories for animals to be conscious?" - Our concepts influence what and how we come to know about animals and the world. Without certain concepts, we cannot make sense of certain things, but it doesn't mean that these things don't exist or they don't have anything to be learned about them. BTW, information is something that has the power to REDUCE UNCERTAINTY ABOUT SOME PROPOSITION/BELIEF. And propositions have meaning only to human subjects. You will never get around this, at leat if you don't want to get into circular and contradictory theories. Do you endorse dialetheism?
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
@@GeorgWilde If you live in most continental countries you are a bourgeois subject of right, subject juridique. If you live in the UK or Canada you are a subject of her Sovereign Majesty Elizabeth, if you live in the USA you are a 'legal person'. The juridical categories vary between jurisdictions. A firm for example can be a legal person in English or US law, but it can not be a subject of Her Majesty. But the juridical notions of subject of right, subject of the queen, or legal person tell us nothing about consciousness. The juridical or philosophical notions of 'the subject' tell us nothing about why nitrous oxide removes consciousness. The term 'subject' as used in continental philosophy is what Althusser called an 'ideological closure'. It purports to explain something but really explains nothing in terms of causal processes. The subject is to human behaviour what the will of the gods was to the weather.
@GeorgWilde
3 жыл бұрын
@@paulcockshott8733 The state of anyone's consciousness is not knowable (even if you can somehow analyze the brain matter, people will attempt to prevent you doing that), nor is human behavior reliably predictable. A little thought experiment: A scientist comes up with a theory for predicting human behavior. But if he could do that, someone alse could have done that and then use the predictions to act in exactly opposite manner (this is analogous to the halting problem). Another variant: The scientist seeks knowledge, therefore he doesn't know the future state of his consciousness. So he cannot reliably apply any theory of consciousness to himself. We could possibly apply these theories (if such did exist) only on the condition that the target consciousness is prevented to attain knowlege we have. But there will be always ever higher level of knowledge and sophistication from which you are trying to observe the lower level and which cannot be itself currently studied. The subjects in economics are an abstraction. It is a methodology that accepts that people have consciousnesses and that these are not directly accessible to any theoriest. So most is hidden within the "subjects" (their knowlege of their situation and their preferences). Actions under the condition non-coercion from other humans then give only a partial insight to the subjects preferences. That's because actions under the condition of no coercion from others are actualisation of one opportunity and loss of alternative oportunities. If you observe individuals without someone interfering with them by coercion, you can know at least something about them. Once coercion is applied, the potential actions are so restricted, that they don't tell you anything - you might as well start to open skulls now. This is completely independent of any metaphysical presupositions. You can be a materialist, not having any hard divide between consciousness and the rest. The logic of knowing and acting is enough for these bariers in knowledge about ourselves to arrise. I don't think the subject as in the legal tradition has anything to do with this. A firm being a subject is clearly a nonsense in the sense i talked about. We are also not beholden to affirm any philosophical tradition.
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
@@GeorgWilde On the first question about predictability of behaviour. In the very first lecture of my first year psychology course the lecturer, a strong behaviourists, said : " for those who claim human behaviour is unpredictable, I shall make a strong prediction. At tomorrow's lecture none of the class will turn up naked." He was correct in his prediction. It is worth mentioning that this was in Canada in the winter. Why do you say a firm being a subject is nonsense in the sense that you talk about. You are presenting the classic Hayekian claim about the inaccessibility of knowledge making planning impossible. The Hayekian claim applies a-fortiori to firms. Hayek claims that only the firm knows about its situation and aims. Firms go to some efforts to keep information about their internal cost structures private. So not only is the subject a category of bourgois law generated by commodity production, its use to justify the market economy is entirely tied up with the fact that firms are subjects of right and keep private their knowledge of opportunities.
@rainerlippert
3 жыл бұрын
Quote: „The main economic actors are firms, not human individuals.“ With this statement, the exaggerated objectivism comes to the fore, which was a major problem in the central planning of the socialist states. This statement is in connection with the statement "... into this in commodity production ...", which also appears in this video. Commodities cannot be produced as such; work products are produced. According to Marx, a work product only becomes a commodity when it becomes a use value for others through exchange. Only then will the work involved be qualified as socially useful and thus value-building. Only then the work will be qualified as labour. This also makes it clear that value cannot be produced. Value is a social relationship and is created in the market. There it is assigned to both the goods and the value equivalent within the framework of a value relationship. The value size is objective, but also subjectively determined - that cannot be any different in a social relationship. The exchange of a work product does not take place simply because there is human work in it, but because the work result appears to be sufficiently meaningful for an exchange. Exchange and thus value creation are linked to people. If the products are not bought, all of the company's systems and processes are of no use. Quote: “In a big firm, actions result from procedures, reviews etc involving many people. The procedures are more important than the people. " It sounds like the processes can determine the purchase. It is not so. It is the buyers, i.e. people, who decide whether to buy or not to buy. The processes don't create themselves, nor do they work for themselves. They are created by people to act for people's interests. The people are still the most important thing, the buildings, machines, processes, etc. have no will of their own. Central planning can only work if the market is also used. Economics is not about needs, but about weighted needs, because economics is about the use of limited resources. The weighted needs are only recognized through the market, not through algorithms, because consciousness processes play a role. For the estimation of production figures and thus of the use of raw materials, machine use, etc., it makes sense to plan ahead. However, you cannot directly plan the values. Information is clearly important for potential buyers. But for the purchase it is the processing of this information, what Hayek (according to you) incorrectly calls 'subjective information', the knowledge in people's heads.
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
It seem you are unfamiliar with algorithmic trading.
@rainerlippert
3 жыл бұрын
@@paulcockshott8733 Thank you for your answer! It seems that you are not familiar with the principle of value creation. Algorithm-based trading is familiar to me from the financial world. But the algorithms did not program themselves. They were programmed by people on behalf of certain interest groups. They only execute decisions that humans would, only faster. They cannot determine what will be recognized as socially useful by people. They can only decide on the basis of criteria what, with what probability, will be socially useful and they have no interests of their own. In the financial world, this is likely to work a little differently than in the world of goods. If algorithms were to determine the formation of value, i.e. to determine what people weight and how in purchasing processes, bankruptcies would be avoided, since the entrepreneurs would only have to let algorithms decide about production and sales. That shouldn't work. What you could determine with “trade algorithms” would be allocations of work products, natural goods, services, works of art, etc. to the members of society. But those would not be trading algorithms but allocation algorithms. It is an unrealistic dream of socialists and communists that planning should replace the market. I don't mean to say that capitalism can solve society's problems. But socialism will be able to do it even less, especially not if it is designed with planning without considering the market. Value was created above all to conserve resources in society: on the production side, it counteracts the waste of resources in production and on the consumer side, it counteracts the waste of resources when using them - without question value is not able to prevent waste. If you want to establish a distribution mechanism with no value formation, i.e. no market, the economy will become inefficient. That was the main problem in the socialist states. Ultimately, this system collapsed due to a lack of performance. You would repeat such a process.
@KrupyFren
3 жыл бұрын
@@rainerlippert There is a stark difference between creating value and gaming the system that decreases the value of other's work to gain profit, which is exactly where the profits from trading on stock exchange and futures exchange. No value is being created there, yet they rake in more than they put in. Sure a work was done in programming and debugging these algorithm, the work which can be accounted as such. But the work of programming can be compared to textile workers putting threads through the heddle of the loom, and then maintenance can be compared to looking if the machine is operating properly, or if there is thread in the shuttle and if it did not break. So women walk and maintain the loom, while the overhead shaft powered by a steam engine does all the heavy lifting when it comes to weaving the cloth. And as american union leader big Bill Haywood famously said, "if a man got a dollar he did not work for, then a man worked and did not get a dollar". Which should say enough about the sort of Kantian concept of same rules to all, as it can be observed today and in history. Also regarding your arguments, nobody expects algorithms to decide what is useful for people, not even a craziest socialist would. The entire argument here is that an algorithm can do the allocation and price calculation faster and more precise than a market does. And entrepreneurs already use algorithms, heuristic, either in computers or in their heads, market research, all that is information gathering and processing. The concept of an entrepreneur is one of the exact misconception about information that is precisely presented in this video. What an entrepreneur does can be just as well done by a same machine with same inputs, outputs and processing power equal or greater than what is required to make these decisions that an entrepreneur does. But unlike a said entrepreneur, or the subject, the machine is not a social entity, nor it is a legal category. Many so called real people called entrepreneurs already employ many of the methods developed by the Soviet planners, and many capitalist firms also employ internally economic planning algorithms for allocation. Which should already say at least something about the merits of computational tools in oppositions of conception of human mind that are stuck in dark ages.
@paulcockshott8733
3 жыл бұрын
@@rainerlippert Value is created by socially necessary labour. I dont dispute that. The point I was disputing was that there was any 'subjective' element to it. Firms can, and indeed do in many cases, automate their purchasing of commodities. The value of the commodities comes from the necessity to expend labour on their purchase not from subsequent estimates of their value that may be made by people or purchasing algorithms. The company purchasers, whether human or algorithmic, are at best attempting to model the real process of value creation, which is a projection onto money of the necessary social distribution of labour. They no more cause the values to come into existence than I cause the moon to exist by percieving it on a clear evening.
@babygottbach2679
3 жыл бұрын
Cockshott has a video on his channel about some sort of algorithmic "price" signal to be used for socialist planning, where the the warehouses from which people purchase goods would automatically adjust the price of goods so that supply and demand equal, and the difference between the price of the good and its embodied labor time cost would then be used as the basis for reallocation of resources away from goods where the price is lower than the labor time cost of the good and towards goods where the price is higher than the labor time cost.
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