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Comment by Hytosys | Hacker News Reader

>I'm not sure how factors of production (including durable capital goods) can possibly be an "enemy" of anything.

I'm a Marxist. So in the aforementioned sense, capital is only wealth that grows over time through the process of exchange. I am referring to the process, not the assets.

As I mentioned before, I am not interested in analyzing the behaviors of individual employers. I am interested in analyzing the behaviors of the classes. You may call this oversimplification, but I call it cutting through the bullshit.

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Do you accept the labor theory of value and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall? If so, then any economic argument you make will be on false premises.

Firms and markup prices are not at all individual employer behaviors. They're industry-wide behaviors that practically define mixed economies and thus, by your own definition, capital (though I think yours is overly vague).

I haven't yet read the last volume of Capital, so I am unprepared to take on the line of discussion in regards to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

Nonetheless, I fail to see how the simple arguments I initially made are affected by this diversion, and I fail to see how your analysis of price-setting mechanisms refutes the profit motive.

I don't deny the profit motive.

I deny a) the normative claim of there being some form of malevolence in it, b) the idea that it's the only thing firms maximize for when in fact we clearly observe that firms will sacrifice some profit for both internal equilibrium and sending out consistent signals to consumers and c) that a profit motive will not exist in a hypothetical socialist or communist society.

Whether it's the manorialist collecting rent on land or the bartering farmer balancing their supply of wheat traded to remain at a surplus while keeping a stock of other consumer goods they've bought, there's always a profit motive. The manorialist profits either from use of a land title or the use of land as a factor of production. The farmer profits by having their supply of goods be at a state where the marginal product of each good provides increasing returns for satisfying their ends. In other words, the farmer profits from having a heterogeneous stock over a homogeneous stock because they can use the former to obtain further goods to diversify their portfolio, or trade so as to improve the serviceableness and efficiency of their factors for growing wheat.

I think your point a) about there not being malevolence involved is quite important, and not repeated enough. If you have a world organised around private property and exclusion from what you need, people have no choice but to look at each other as means to their own ends.

Regarding c), I believe a communist would say that in a state-less and money-less society, it is not possible to appropriate wealth in the abstract (there are no means to do it). So it's not the motivation for profit that is abolished, it's the possibility of profit itself.

a) To this end I agree that my simplification is too emotional.

b) I typically regard such actions as means to sustain profit, but I won't deny the exceptions to this rule.

c) I scrutinize the definition of profit here, but I won't disagree with what I believe to be your sentiment.

You go on to describe the feudal and individual capitalist (I think?) modes of production, which helps to define profit, but this is otherwise divergent from (c). In the communist mode of production, "profit" serves the community (ideally global), not the individual. I'm wondering what your profit analysis of the communist mode of production is.

I presume the communist mode of production is one in a stateless, money-less society where factors of production are cooperatively owned by workers and where the production process is based on some definition of "use" rather than "profit". Profit would be the surplus employed by workers to create more use value. Goods would be traded "in kind" as is without a lubricant of exchange like money.

The canonical argument against this is "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth". There's generally been two ways socialist thinkers have tried to get around this: a) calculation in kind, which essentially reverts us back to unscalable barter where there is no reliable unit of account, and b) the Lange model of a Central Planning Board, which immediately brings all the issues of public choice, bureaucracy and "state capitalism" as you derided it earlier.

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