🇵🇸 single use plastique 🏴☠️ on Nostr: Sylwia 🏳️⚧️ :nyarch: yeah considering they just ripped off other people, ...
Sylwia 🏳️⚧️ :nyarch: (nprofile…twud)
yeah considering they just ripped off other people, and personally i have been very interested by marxist tradition but i would hesitate to even use the word 'marxism'
I mean it's one thing to read reactionary thinkers critically, as an anarchist i think i have a much richer understanding the State by Studying Machievelli, Hobbes or Carl Schmidt ( Tiqqun draws heavily from Smidt ) I'm probably as much a machievellian as a marxist, but to call myself that outside of a very specific context would lead to some unnecessary confusion. I also don't think Rothbard is in the same category as them or idk Hegel, he's not a "great thinker" by any metric, he was basically just a dipshit con artist running free lance capitalist psyops.
i once aspirated to be an economist, so i'm just gonna info dump
the Austrian school of economics emerged parallel to the other schools in the "Marginalist Revolution" in Switzerland and England, this was due to a crisis of Liberalism and Political Economy in the mid to late 19th century, partly because Marx and others Critique of Political Economy, building upon the classical labour theory of value, a central pillar in the systems of Adam Smith, JB Say, Mill, Ricardo Sismondi etc. well it clearly shows that the foundation of capitalist profit is the exploitation of the working classes any way you formulate it. This is inconvenient because Economics exists, not only as practical knowledge to aide in the management of capital and governance, but as an ideological justification for Capitalism itself and for the promotion of policies that benefit the capitalist class. You can't have your quasi scientific capitalist apologia demonstrating the need for socialism.
So labour theory of value had to go, and the old non socialist systems of political economy were largely scholastic and speculative lacking any scientific rigour, so to the rescue comes the theory of marginal utility, which gives a rational and mathematical basis for price calculation -- supply and demand was already part of economics since forever, but the marginalists presented much more sophisticated fine tuning, which they used as a foundation for grand theories, and as a weapon against marxism/socialism.
This "discovery" or development or whatever was made independently by Carl Menger founder of austrian school, who to be fair wrote a pretty good book on practical economics, tho it has many problematic assumptions, along with Jevons in France, and walrus in swiss, this is the beginning of neoclassical economics and for first few decades Austrian school was a legit school of economics, Joseph Schumpeter came out of austrian school is one of the great theorists of the business cycle and economic development and no mere capitalists shill, even Hayek, reactionary in his politics has some interesting bits ( the calculation problem in planned economies is real ) but then with Von Mises or others they're pure ideologists of the ruling class, academic cops.
The problem is marginal utility is a perfectly valid theory of price formation, especially on the micro-economic level, but it is not a theory of value as such, it doesn't do anything to explain how a use-value(utility> can be sold at an exchange-value(price), why is it necessary that money exists at all? Marginal Utility takes all these things for granted as universal laws of nature rather than historical particularities, and so systems of macro-economics based on this like General Equilibrium Theory are just mathematical utopias. This reaches it's absurd heights with Chicago school neoclassicals who have constructed hyper mathematical systems that are completely useless in the real world. Austrians don't do math, they rely on informal logic and everyday situations to democrate their theory, which in some ways makes it more grounded than the Chicago School but is also why Astrian school languished and died ( that and ya know wwII )
But yeah they reject labour value because they read it as a theory of price formation, which it is not, so while there are many methodological falws in marxism that can be picked at, their critique is fundamentally a straw man and so basically useless
It is really quite an achievement because the Labour theory of Value in some form is ancient and universally acknowledged , you can find references to it in the Vedas or Homer, Aristotle, Confucius etc. its' just immanently obvious that labour generates value which is why the early Political Economists, Physiocrats, Mercantilists mention it at the beginning of their treatise. Many cases of scientists denying indisputable facts to benefit some interest, like when Behaviorists used to deny deny the empirical existence of subjective experience.
yeah considering they just ripped off other people, and personally i have been very interested by marxist tradition but i would hesitate to even use the word 'marxism'
I mean it's one thing to read reactionary thinkers critically, as an anarchist i think i have a much richer understanding the State by Studying Machievelli, Hobbes or Carl Schmidt ( Tiqqun draws heavily from Smidt ) I'm probably as much a machievellian as a marxist, but to call myself that outside of a very specific context would lead to some unnecessary confusion. I also don't think Rothbard is in the same category as them or idk Hegel, he's not a "great thinker" by any metric, he was basically just a dipshit con artist running free lance capitalist psyops.
i once aspirated to be an economist, so i'm just gonna info dump
the Austrian school of economics emerged parallel to the other schools in the "Marginalist Revolution" in Switzerland and England, this was due to a crisis of Liberalism and Political Economy in the mid to late 19th century, partly because Marx and others Critique of Political Economy, building upon the classical labour theory of value, a central pillar in the systems of Adam Smith, JB Say, Mill, Ricardo Sismondi etc. well it clearly shows that the foundation of capitalist profit is the exploitation of the working classes any way you formulate it. This is inconvenient because Economics exists, not only as practical knowledge to aide in the management of capital and governance, but as an ideological justification for Capitalism itself and for the promotion of policies that benefit the capitalist class. You can't have your quasi scientific capitalist apologia demonstrating the need for socialism.
So labour theory of value had to go, and the old non socialist systems of political economy were largely scholastic and speculative lacking any scientific rigour, so to the rescue comes the theory of marginal utility, which gives a rational and mathematical basis for price calculation -- supply and demand was already part of economics since forever, but the marginalists presented much more sophisticated fine tuning, which they used as a foundation for grand theories, and as a weapon against marxism/socialism.
This "discovery" or development or whatever was made independently by Carl Menger founder of austrian school, who to be fair wrote a pretty good book on practical economics, tho it has many problematic assumptions, along with Jevons in France, and walrus in swiss, this is the beginning of neoclassical economics and for first few decades Austrian school was a legit school of economics, Joseph Schumpeter came out of austrian school is one of the great theorists of the business cycle and economic development and no mere capitalists shill, even Hayek, reactionary in his politics has some interesting bits ( the calculation problem in planned economies is real ) but then with Von Mises or others they're pure ideologists of the ruling class, academic cops.
The problem is marginal utility is a perfectly valid theory of price formation, especially on the micro-economic level, but it is not a theory of value as such, it doesn't do anything to explain how a use-value(utility> can be sold at an exchange-value(price), why is it necessary that money exists at all? Marginal Utility takes all these things for granted as universal laws of nature rather than historical particularities, and so systems of macro-economics based on this like General Equilibrium Theory are just mathematical utopias. This reaches it's absurd heights with Chicago school neoclassicals who have constructed hyper mathematical systems that are completely useless in the real world. Austrians don't do math, they rely on informal logic and everyday situations to democrate their theory, which in some ways makes it more grounded than the Chicago School but is also why Astrian school languished and died ( that and ya know wwII )
But yeah they reject labour value because they read it as a theory of price formation, which it is not, so while there are many methodological falws in marxism that can be picked at, their critique is fundamentally a straw man and so basically useless
It is really quite an achievement because the Labour theory of Value in some form is ancient and universally acknowledged , you can find references to it in the Vedas or Homer, Aristotle, Confucius etc. its' just immanently obvious that labour generates value which is why the early Political Economists, Physiocrats, Mercantilists mention it at the beginning of their treatise. Many cases of scientists denying indisputable facts to benefit some interest, like when Behaviorists used to deny deny the empirical existence of subjective experience.