A Marxist Analysis of the iPhone (2019)
socialisteconomist.com
socialisteconomist.com
I think it fits the bill HN has for intellectual curiosity fairly well.
Why are you choosing to dilute your message by attaching it to (what a substantial chunk of the audience would see as) a repulsive logo? What would you have to gain by doing that? Puzzling...
Other people consider capitalism, western powers, imperialism, islamism, christianism, and others to taste, associated with "the deaths of tens of millions and suffering of hundreds of millions more" and yet you probably have no problem with at least one of those, if not more...
As if Marx or Marxism implies some inevitable association with Stalinism (or e.g. Christianity = the crusades, the spanish inquisition, etc.).
Is it? I believe that there are hundreds (or thousands?) of engineers working for Apple full time. And I can see that just keeping linux at my home computer updated needs combined efforts of hundreds of people at very least. So it seems very unlikely to me that R&D costs for newer iPhones are negligible. Am I right?
Meanwhile we are still in the dark ages technology-wise.
Let me know when a worker cooperative assembles the next iPhone from scratch.
Why don’t supporters of socialism assemble worker cooperatives and prove to us they can innovate?
Another way to look at it is Apple’s company-wide R&D and SG&A were 25% of the costs to create products (not services).
So the R&D costs are not negligible and the article probably overestimates the amount of exploitation. On the other hand, Apple made $67 billion before tax, so they could afford to pay their workers more.
Shouldnt the costs for sales and marketing, management layers, store janitors, etc. also be included in variable capitol and the stores and buildings housing them in constant capitol (pro rata)
I do not know whether they should or not. I'm not an economist, I tried to read some textbooks at some point, but finished not a one. I've decided to read article because I was interested how it is going to deal with the costs of R&D. I had no clear idea how to do it. And with first read-through I missed the quoted excerpt, so I though that it should be a part of a variable capital, though I was surprised it was not mentioned in the article. I reread article and found the statement that R&D costs should be ignored.
My chair is a commodity. The physical iPhone manufactured at a Foxconn factory has aspects of a commodity.
But is that physical iPhone device worth hundreds of dollars solely for its physical manufacture form? I know that teams of dozens/hundreds are working on software updates to push out over the network to fix problems and enhance the device. This helps make the high price worth it. But here the idea of the device as a traditional commodity breaks down. My chair does not get fixes and improvements pushed to it, at a very low cost, from a relatively small team.
I should note, this does not negate the idea that Foxconn workers are exploited, rather that the math is off. Because the iPhone price is from a mix of traditional manufacture, plus those programmers in Cupertino pushing out updates, and an analysis must take this difference into account.