The Capitalist Threat

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Fine. It's just that your contemptuous attack of Marxism is definitely not bias free. You don't express the same amount of outrage towards the acts of violence and exploitation perpetrated by capitalistic empires.

I'm not required to provide equal time to criticisms of capitalism in a post where I'm specifically criticizing Marxism. That's like me requiring someone to spend equal time criticizing feminism, democracy or conservatives on this board. I'm wondering which acts of violence you are speaking of, I've read Le Livre Noir du Capitalisme, and quite frankly found that most of the attempts by the authors to link capitalism to certain acts mentioned within the book were non sequiturs at best. The first and second world wars can hardly be attributed to capitalism, neither can anti-communist wars. However, there is potentially an argument to be made that anti-communist wars were motivated by democracy.



Wage labor is the selling of labor power by an individual or a collective group to a purchaser in exchange for an agreed upon amount. There is the criticism that wage labor is not a choice due to alternate ways of self-sustainment being removed, which at this point must be considered largely an anachronism when used in a modern society due to the complexity having evolved to a point where a single person or family cannot sustain themselves outside of either owning their own business or wage labor. The traditional peasant and hunter professions can simply not provide an adequate life anymore.

One could say that the "barriers of entry" for self-sustainment has increased, but that would have been a natural consequence with or without capitalism (and definitely under communism), due to the fact that the population keeps increasing and the land amount it zero-sum.

There is the criticism that wage labor is not voluntary as it is a result of economic necessity, which is a bit like arguing that stealing isn't a choice, if it is motivated by economic necessity. The argument gets murdered by reductio ad absurdum fairly quickly, I think Dostoevsky went through some of the same motions in "Crime and Punishment".

Finally there is the criticism regarding wage slavery, which relies heavily upon faulty argument from analogy in order to compare a voluntary employer - employee relationship.

Labor as a commodity distinct from goods and services is a bit strange since in the Western world we are largely becoming a service driven economy, in which labor power literally is a commodity being sold. The main difference between labor and other commodities is that it's renewable which means that unlike just about every other commodity is not zero-sum (finite amount), of course even Marx himself defined commodity in such a way as to make labor a commodity.

Automation is tricky, because while it does undermine demand for manual labor, it also shifts some of that demand to other things. Furthermore, automation is a better alternative in most cases to manual labor, so a suitable analogy would be to say that the motorcar undermined the demand for horses and buggies, but it also shifted most of that demand from said horses and buggies to the motorcar. I.E. demand remained near-constant, but became aimed at a different target.

Cost cutting is not as tricky, does it undermine demand? Yes. Is it for that reason always bad? No.

For not being like other commodities, labor sure behaves a lot like other commodities in terms of supply and demand.

We ought to make up a Godwin's Law like meme for Marxism. It seems like every argument inevitably leads to Marxism here.

If exploitation is defined as using another person's labor value without payment them adequate compensation, it can also be explained using neoclassical theory as a market inefficiency or failure of competition or using New liberalism as much the same. However doing so eliminates the need for the class focus of Marxism and without the class focus, Marxism starts to crumble. It's one of those, "If seen isolated, every piece of Marxism falls apart, it's only persuasive if read as a whole without critical thinking involved".

You're also using the terms "inferior good" and "superior good" wrong, a necessity can be a superior good as well an inferior good. In essence the difference between buying store brand ham at Wal-Mart or buying farm raised ham at a farmer's market. I assume you're speaking of items with strong and weak price elasticity, I.E items for which there is little effect on demand when the price moves, vs products where there is a high effect on demand when there is a price movement. In which case the subjective theory of value that originated in the Austrian school comes into play.

I do not really see how that could be used to explain exploitation though.

Replacing the Labor Theory of Value with the Marginal Theory of Value does not rationalize away exploitation.

I will explain exploitation in the simplest terms. Suppose you are stranded on a desert island and you are going to die through dehydration in less than three days. By pure happenstance I come by in a boat. You are overjoyed until I let you know that you may purchase your own rescue for the price of your wife, family, and house. It would not be in your "rational best interest" to refuse my offer as we both stand to gain substantial marginal utility through our mutual contract. But something tells me (assuming you're not a complete imbecile) that you will either respond irrationally by cursing me and showing me the bird, or more likely you will pretend to accept my offer knowing full well that I won't be able to get the state court system to enforce the terms of our agreement should you later refuse to pay up.

This scenario and certain "wage slavery" scenarios only differs in degree, not substance. If the alternative is death, I can offer to rescue you at practically any price you can pay. I.e. the price of being rescued is almost perfectly inelastic with respect to your demand in the predicament described. On the other hand the price of your house in any reasonable market will be much more elastic. The bottom line is the common moral intuition of non-psychopaths kind of goes against the "anything goes as long as there's no coercion" stance of capitalism. In this sense Marx had a perfectly valid point. He believed class division allowed capitalists to collectively abandon their normal moral intuition and justify exploitation. If you look at the average working conditions in the 19th century I believe Marx was 100% correct in this assessment.

As for the "inferior good" vs "superior good" I was just trying to use neoclassical jargon and based on the literal textbook definition I read the items need not be in the same category. I would come up with a better system of classifying commodities though. The true market can be divided into categories of goods such that goods within a specific category are more readily substituted for each other. At low incomes goods belonging to different "needs" categories are not as readily substitutable. If you're already paying the cheapest rent and buying the cheapest food you aren't going to be able to adjust your budget by substituting more food for less rent or vice versa. This will make the categories as a whole price-inelastic even though in-category substitutions might cause individual commodities to appear elastic by themselves. Also, as society becomes more technologically advanced certain commodities that were previously deemed "convenience" goods (i.e. time and effort saving) start to behave more like needs. In 1912 owning a car was a convenience. These days it's more like a need, especially in places without good public transportation.

In order to make your argument work, you're using a premise that is only implicit, namely that there is no market, there is a monopoly.

This is assuming that the cheapest rent and the cheapest foods are not elastic, if I understand your argument correctly.