This was a great conversation, and everyone did an excellent job trying to verbalize some pretty abstract concepts on the fly. I do worry there might be some light misunderstandings regarding Marx's arguments about the LTV, that if cleared up might answer some questions brought up! When explaining exchange values in vol 1 of capital, supply & demand are assumed to be equal as an abstraction, so that the concrete underlying laws/aspects of capital can be analyzed. Through this assumed balance of supply/demand (and equal exchange), marx looks at the production process and concludes that the exchange value of a commodity is determined by the commodity inputs (labor-value + resources + means of production), but the _price_ (different from the exchange value) of a commodity fluctuates based on the exchange value + supply & demand factors. Despite this potential misunderstanding of LTV, you both seem to understand this and acknowledge it intuitively from your own lived experiences in the following bit, tom when he mentions compounding bookings producing feedback of demand for an artist, and bill when he mentions the labor inputs provided by a solid team of marketing/agent/label workers. It's important to remember that capital used in the production process are considered "dead-labor," which is actualized by living labor, and all contribute to the final surplus value realized through the capital-production circuit. things like the speakers brought in for the event can contain different amounts of "dead" labor-value "valorized" (to use Marx's terminology) by the living labor provided at the time of the show. the marketing teams, agents, marketing equipment (posters, ads, billboards, etc) all contain dead-labor, and in the case of marketing/ads, can affect the demand. to push back on the ticket sales methodology, I don't necessarily think that's how show's pay out currently, with the above understanding in mind. It certainly seems that way because transferring the “commodity of the spectacle” for money' (money delta) fetishizes where the value is actually being produced. Money is realized at the point of ticket sale, but money is a universal, representative form of commodity different from value, which is produced & embedded into the commodity via labor. You're still getting paid a rate/wage, based on capacity to labor. This capacity to do labor is called your "labor-power" and is considered a commodity to be sold by the worker to the owner. The value your labor generates, with the above parameters in mind (supply/demand/dead labor-value) determines the price of your labor-power commodity you sell to the promoter. Because this is obviously difficult to calculate precisely, market indicators (like ticket sales) are utilized by the seller/buyer to speculate the price of your labor-power. They then pay the artists under that amount hoping to make profit. If they don't sell enough, in theory if the contracts are held up & the pay still occurs, it creates a loss for the promoter, because they aren't paying you based on the number of tickets you sell, they're paying you for your labor-power, the capacity for you to provide labor. and whether you provide enough or less than needed for their profit, the contract was a rate based on your _capacity._ that's all in line with the LTV, and a part of his explanation. Marx’s point wasn't simply that we should be paid a fair wage from the owners because the workers make the stuff. he was critiquing classical political economy, using the arguments of capitalist/liberal theorists at the time. the labor theory of value was first theorized by Smith, then Ricardo, and then advanced by Marx. his point in mentioning labor-value is to explain where value comes from so that he can explain how capital flows, and how it accumulates. he's making a dialectical argument that unfolds from the origins of value, then analyzes its forms, use value and exchange value. from there, he looks at the concrete/abstract forms of value, money and the commodity. he analyzes the origins of commodities, production, and the origins of money, exchange of commodities. the argument unfolds from there as a material analysis, following the almost cause-effect flow of the "laws of motion" of capital. He reaches the idea, that capital accumulates through a circuit of production, where the money/universal value form is used to purchase commodities, including the means of production as well as human labor-power (the capacity to do labor), in order to produce money', or "money delta", which is money plus surplus value created through the labor process. living labor is transferred into dead labor, capital, in an endless cycle that leads to centralization/monopolization of capital. Other things that contribute to this are the speculative production methods we mentioned in the above paragraph. as promoters use things like ticket sales to try and estimate the exchange value to get an accurate price, this can lead to economic crisis to develop. crisis can develop from over production, under production, lack of liquid capital/credit. Through these crisis, certain businesses fail and others succeed, which leads to a consolidation of the market. new businesses then have to compete with the surviving monopolies, creating a feedback loop of extreme capital accumulation/hoarding by the owning class, as well as a proletarianization of the petite-bourgeoise small business class (or as tom put it, artist b not playing the game, getting surpassed by artist a, and then becoming disillusioned/jaded. When an artist, a small business owner/"petite-bourgeoise", gets out competed/burnt out and accepts a job as a real estate agent or what have you, they become proletarianized). this leads marx to the conclusion that the next mode of production, socialism, will be social in nature. because the means of production have been monopolized by the capitalist class, any subsequent change in the relations of production through class struggle, would have to be centralized/socially owned in order to operate the forces of production/transition into a planned economy based on use values, as opposed to exchange value, for commodity distribution. The transition to producing goods for their social use-value also answers your questions regarding incentives at the hour mark. The incentives for continuing to work and produce quality goods efficiently would come from the social relations in exchange. Things would be produced because they're needed. that same relation exists under capitalism, but we opt to use exchange value, because capitalism is about realizing relative surplus value for the owner of capital. it's important to understand that. around 58 minutes you mention innovation under capitalism occurs to create a better product in order to make more sales, but this isn't the only way capitalists can increase relative surplus value. they can increase it by multiplying productivity, increasing intensity of labor, decreasing quality of the resource/commodity inputs, outsourcing labor to cheaper markets, etc. To me, the biggest incentive to participate in socialism, is to live in a functioning society where surplus labor isn't extracted by private interests, but is instead extracted socially to be used for social needs. To exist in a society where productivity increasing technology could decrease the necessary workday, as opposed to increasing relative surplus value for the owning class. Further, it's mention how innovation is good for the consumer, but not the environment. The issue is most consumers are also workers, and the benefits to the consumer through increases in supply via increase in productive technology thereby driving down prices are then lost to the worker, when wages drop/rise corresponding to the price of upkeep for the individual selling their labor-power. As goods become cheaper through an increase in supply/productivity, wages can be lowered. The two are tied together and fluctuate based on their correlation. The other issue is that the increase in relative surplus value to the owner through tech innovation driving up production only temporarily increases relative surplus value. as soon as the technology is adopted by competitors, it balances out, with a mass increase to the supply, causing a fall in the rate of profit for the capitalist. This is called the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and is a major driver for imperialism/colonialism. As the imperial core industrializes, certain firms will seek cheaper labor in order to combat the falling rate of profit. Under capitalism, the technologies that are funded/researched etc, as we mentioned, are ones that can be utilizes to increase relative surplus value. This leads to emergent tech that tends to create mass access to monopolized or skilled labor. Earlier I mentioned the wage drops/rises corresponding to the price of upkeep for the individual selling their labor-power commodity. the other factor in beyond upkeep is production time, or "training" time in terms of human labor-power. For example, If it takes 15 years to become a skilled artist capable of painting matte paintings for a movie set, you can understand why style transfer/ai models are being funded/developed, in order to decrease the cost of labor in design production. or why the power hammer was invented for blacksmithing, opening the door to less physically strong blacksmiths, etc. By increasing the supply of labor, you can decrease the cost of the labor-power commodity, because price =/= exchange value, it is only the measurement of labor-value embedded into the commodity before being subjugated to supply/demand.
in terms of averaging pay for everyone/democratic vote for the show, I don't know that it necessarily the best way to approach solving Marx's criticisms, but I don't think that's what was being attempted with the show. For instance, because it doesn't address competition between firms (or the individuals at the event, although tom touches on this with making sure you have the right people participating with the model or else there could be issues), being outcompeted by more exploitive groups is likely, and it doesn't have social ownership of production. I do however think discussing rates as a group beforehand/having transparency is a good check for trying to limit exploitation in our current system/opens the door for conversation & possible collective action.
It’s great to see one of my favourite artists admit to being on the left and try to transmit some ideas about what that means to his audience. For those here that want to defend capitalism- not all spawn points are the same- so privilege must be examined truthfully via material analysis or you get dumb ideas like “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” or “trickle down effect” taken as truth by people that don’t want to analyse their own advantages or those of their unworthy heroes like Elon and are defending a system that is killing the planet and starving people as a political and social choice but does not pay for the harms caused via pollution or hoarding resources while people starve.
"Life is not fair so it's ethically justifiable to use government to threaten workers with violence in order to steal their productivity and give it to me and people who agree with me." - You
@@Satoshi08 That's a bit daft. I's not what I'm saying at all. There are plenty of incidences of corporations that threaten workers in the global south who continually have their productivity stolen via exploitation, Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, Minerals.. it's a huge list with plenty of evidence, if you want to critique the actual system we live under rather than attibuting things to strangers that you have zero evidence for. It's amazing how you completely ignored the bit about the features of Capitalism- such as starving the poor and came out with some weird far right accusation. Are you a bot?
@@Satoshi08You could've just said you have no idea what socialism is lol. The state ALREADY backs union-busting corporations by sending armed squads of police to intimidate workers who are merely fighting for better pay.
I am 10 minutes in, and am I the only one who has literally no idea what Keota is saying? Lmao no disrespect of course but I am struggling to get any kind of point from him. Maybe I'm dumb haha
no he sounds like someone who speedran socialism by spending too much time on twitter and has no clue how to actually articulate ideas behind all of the buzzwords he picked up
extremely painful episode... i don't have strong convictions in the capitalism vs. socialism debate, but keota has me wanting to ardently defend markets lmao. i think bill was giving some really basic pushback that keota struggled to respond to because it sounds like he's been spending more time on twitter than actually reading about any of this in depth. i also like mark fisher, but i think using Capitalist Realism in the way he does here is such a coping mechanism - you can't just say "uhhh it's actually really hard to imagine how socialism solves all these problems because the public imagination simply can't comprehend it."
It was painful for me, too. I couldn't have been prepared to address some of the points as eloquently as I would've preferred if I had tried. You just never know what points are going to be brought up when talking about a controversial subject, and I didn't take any poly sci classes or any speech & debate extra curriculars lol. It's also quite scary to go into a conversation knowing it will be made public for anyone and everyone to scrutinize. I'm still learning and trying to better understand the world around me, history & theory. And i may have failed to do mark fisher justice if that's the takeaway you or anyone mightve had from my words on that podcast episode. My point in bringing him up, was the point of his book Capitalist Realism, which is simply that the vast majority of people lack the imagination for an alternative to capitalism, because any talk or platforming of anything that even resembles an alternative have been snuffed out of our lexicon, our TV & film, media, vocabularies in general, etc. In no way was I intending to say "people are stupid and that's why they lack the imagination", nor is it a cop out by any stretch of the imagination, just a fact that most people in the US & in the West are not already familiar with alternative models of running society (besides capitalism), so it makes it very difficult to even bridge that gap and have a conversation about it. I'm always open to talking with whomever about it & trying to learn and grow together with others, so my dms are always free if you ever wanna push my buttons, pick my brain, or challenge any of my ideological talking points 😘. I say all this in good faith as well, although it is ofc vewwy scawwy to have conversations like this, especially publically or in front of any sort of audience, regardless of whether it's live or pre-recorded (like this podcast episode). Also P.S. there was no warm up or pre interview before this podcast episode lol, I think that's probably somewhat clear by how clumsy the whole thing felt. & I was literally JUST starting to feel comfortable and quick by the last 20 minutes, but by then it was too late lol
If only there were no profit incentives......? If you were in charge we would all starve to death. Whenever you don't know what you're talking about you insert the phrase "under our current conditions". The problem you are experiencing is related to central banks controlling your currency. Not capitalism. Capitalism is just trading voluntarily. No one forces you to work and you own your body and your labor. "If everyones needs were met". So you mean if you can wield government to point guns at individuals and force them to work to get your basic needs met... Under communism you're a farmer if you're lucky. Not a DJ playing at music festivals.
![АЛАУДИНОВ у Скабеевой: эти их ВСУ нас НЕ ДОГОНЯТ 😁 [Пародия]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/an0anqU4WGQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Nice to listem this conversation! Confuse, but necessary. Good to see some one thinking in new ways. Thanks Bill to provide great content.
This was a great conversation, and everyone did an excellent job trying to verbalize some pretty abstract concepts on the fly.
I do worry there might be some light misunderstandings regarding Marx's arguments about the LTV, that if cleared up might answer some questions brought up! When explaining exchange values in vol 1 of capital, supply & demand are assumed to be equal as an abstraction, so that the concrete underlying laws/aspects of capital can be analyzed. Through this assumed balance of supply/demand (and equal exchange), marx looks at the production process and concludes that the exchange value of a commodity is determined by the commodity inputs (labor-value + resources + means of production), but the _price_ (different from the exchange value) of a commodity fluctuates based on the exchange value + supply & demand factors.
Despite this potential misunderstanding of LTV, you both seem to understand this and acknowledge it intuitively from your own lived experiences in the following bit, tom when he mentions compounding bookings producing feedback of demand for an artist, and bill when he mentions the labor inputs provided by a solid team of marketing/agent/label workers. It's important to remember that capital used in the production process are considered "dead-labor," which is actualized by living labor, and all contribute to the final surplus value realized through the capital-production circuit. things like the speakers brought in for the event can contain different amounts of "dead" labor-value "valorized" (to use Marx's terminology) by the living labor provided at the time of the show. the marketing teams, agents, marketing equipment (posters, ads, billboards, etc) all contain dead-labor, and in the case of marketing/ads, can affect the demand.
to push back on the ticket sales methodology, I don't necessarily think that's how show's pay out currently, with the above understanding in mind. It certainly seems that way because transferring the “commodity of the spectacle” for money' (money delta) fetishizes where the value is actually being produced. Money is realized at the point of ticket sale, but money is a universal, representative form of commodity different from value, which is produced & embedded into the commodity via labor. You're still getting paid a rate/wage, based on capacity to labor. This capacity to do labor is called your "labor-power" and is considered a commodity to be sold by the worker to the owner. The value your labor generates, with the above parameters in mind (supply/demand/dead labor-value) determines the price of your labor-power commodity you sell to the promoter. Because this is obviously difficult to calculate precisely, market indicators (like ticket sales) are utilized by the seller/buyer to speculate the price of your labor-power. They then pay the artists under that amount hoping to make profit. If they don't sell enough, in theory if the contracts are held up & the pay still occurs, it creates a loss for the promoter, because they aren't paying you based on the number of tickets you sell, they're paying you for your labor-power, the capacity for you to provide labor. and whether you provide enough or less than needed for their profit, the contract was a rate based on your _capacity._ that's all in line with the LTV, and a part of his explanation.
Marx’s point wasn't simply that we should be paid a fair wage from the owners because the workers make the stuff. he was critiquing classical political economy, using the arguments of capitalist/liberal theorists at the time. the labor theory of value was first theorized by Smith, then Ricardo, and then advanced by Marx. his point in mentioning labor-value is to explain where value comes from so that he can explain how capital flows, and how it accumulates. he's making a dialectical argument that unfolds from the origins of value, then analyzes its forms, use value and exchange value. from there, he looks at the concrete/abstract forms of value, money and the commodity. he analyzes the origins of commodities, production, and the origins of money, exchange of commodities. the argument unfolds from there as a material analysis, following the almost cause-effect flow of the "laws of motion" of capital. He reaches the idea, that capital accumulates through a circuit of production, where the money/universal value form is used to purchase commodities, including the means of production as well as human labor-power (the capacity to do labor), in order to produce money', or "money delta", which is money plus surplus value created through the labor process. living labor is transferred into dead labor, capital, in an endless cycle that leads to centralization/monopolization of capital. Other things that contribute to this are the speculative production methods we mentioned in the above paragraph. as promoters use things like ticket sales to try and estimate the exchange value to get an accurate price, this can lead to economic crisis to develop. crisis can develop from over production, under production, lack of liquid capital/credit. Through these crisis, certain businesses fail and others succeed, which leads to a consolidation of the market. new businesses then have to compete with the surviving monopolies, creating a feedback loop of extreme capital accumulation/hoarding by the owning class, as well as a proletarianization of the petite-bourgeoise small business class (or as tom put it, artist b not playing the game, getting surpassed by artist a, and then becoming disillusioned/jaded. When an artist, a small business owner/"petite-bourgeoise", gets out competed/burnt out and accepts a job as a real estate agent or what have you, they become proletarianized). this leads marx to the conclusion that the next mode of production, socialism, will be social in nature. because the means of production have been monopolized by the capitalist class, any subsequent change in the relations of production through class struggle, would have to be centralized/socially owned in order to operate the forces of production/transition into a planned economy based on use values, as opposed to exchange value, for commodity distribution.
The transition to producing goods for their social use-value also answers your questions regarding incentives at the hour mark. The incentives for continuing to work and produce quality goods efficiently would come from the social relations in exchange. Things would be produced because they're needed. that same relation exists under capitalism, but we opt to use exchange value, because capitalism is about realizing relative surplus value for the owner of capital. it's important to understand that. around 58 minutes you mention innovation under capitalism occurs to create a better product in order to make more sales, but this isn't the only way capitalists can increase relative surplus value. they can increase it by multiplying productivity, increasing intensity of labor, decreasing quality of the resource/commodity inputs, outsourcing labor to cheaper markets, etc. To me, the biggest incentive to participate in socialism, is to live in a functioning society where surplus labor isn't extracted by private interests, but is instead extracted socially to be used for social needs. To exist in a society where productivity increasing technology could decrease the necessary workday, as opposed to increasing relative surplus value for the owning class.
Further, it's mention how innovation is good for the consumer, but not the environment. The issue is most consumers are also workers, and the benefits to the consumer through increases in supply via increase in productive technology thereby driving down prices are then lost to the worker, when wages drop/rise corresponding to the price of upkeep for the individual selling their labor-power. As goods become cheaper through an increase in supply/productivity, wages can be lowered. The two are tied together and fluctuate based on their correlation. The other issue is that the increase in relative surplus value to the owner through tech innovation driving up production only temporarily increases relative surplus value. as soon as the technology is adopted by competitors, it balances out, with a mass increase to the supply, causing a fall in the rate of profit for the capitalist. This is called the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and is a major driver for imperialism/colonialism. As the imperial core industrializes, certain firms will seek cheaper labor in order to combat the falling rate of profit. Under capitalism, the technologies that are funded/researched etc, as we mentioned, are ones that can be utilizes to increase relative surplus value. This leads to emergent tech that tends to create mass access to monopolized or skilled labor. Earlier I mentioned the wage drops/rises corresponding to the price of upkeep for the individual selling their labor-power commodity. the other factor in beyond upkeep is production time, or "training" time in terms of human labor-power. For example, If it takes 15 years to become a skilled artist capable of painting matte paintings for a movie set, you can understand why style transfer/ai models are being funded/developed, in order to decrease the cost of labor in design production. or why the power hammer was invented for blacksmithing, opening the door to less physically strong blacksmiths, etc. By increasing the supply of labor, you can decrease the cost of the labor-power commodity, because price =/= exchange value, it is only the measurement of labor-value embedded into the commodity before being subjugated to supply/demand.
in terms of averaging pay for everyone/democratic vote for the show, I don't know that it necessarily the best way to approach solving Marx's criticisms, but I don't think that's what was being attempted with the show. For instance, because it doesn't address competition between firms (or the individuals at the event, although tom touches on this with making sure you have the right people participating with the model or else there could be issues), being outcompeted by more exploitive groups is likely, and it doesn't have social ownership of production. I do however think discussing rates as a group beforehand/having transparency is a good check for trying to limit exploitation in our current system/opens the door for conversation & possible collective action.
🧬🔊🧬🔊🧬
The Keota episodes just get better and better
It’s great to see one of my favourite artists admit to being on the left and try to transmit some ideas about what that means to his audience. For those here that want to defend capitalism- not all spawn points are the same- so privilege must be examined truthfully via material analysis or you get dumb ideas like “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” or “trickle down effect” taken as truth by people that don’t want to analyse their own advantages or those of their unworthy heroes like Elon and are defending a system that is killing the planet and starving people as a political and social choice but does not pay for the harms caused via pollution or hoarding resources while people starve.
"Life is not fair so it's ethically justifiable to use government to threaten workers with violence in order to steal their productivity and give it to me and people who agree with me." - You
@@Satoshi08 That's a bit daft. I's not what I'm saying at all. There are plenty of incidences of corporations that threaten workers in the global south who continually have their productivity stolen via exploitation, Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, Minerals.. it's a huge list with plenty of evidence, if you want to critique the actual system we live under rather than attibuting things to strangers that you have zero evidence for. It's amazing how you completely ignored the bit about the features of Capitalism- such as starving the poor and came out with some weird far right accusation. Are you a bot?
@@Satoshi08You could've just said you have no idea what socialism is lol. The state ALREADY backs union-busting corporations by sending armed squads of police to intimidate workers who are merely fighting for better pay.
I feel like the patterned background defeats the purpose of captions.
impressive level of incoherent rambling
thanks bootybounce420
I am 10 minutes in, and am I the only one who has literally no idea what Keota is saying? Lmao no disrespect of course but I am struggling to get any kind of point from him. Maybe I'm dumb haha
no he sounds like someone who speedran socialism by spending too much time on twitter and has no clue how to actually articulate ideas behind all of the buzzwords he picked up
extremely painful episode... i don't have strong convictions in the capitalism vs. socialism debate, but keota has me wanting to ardently defend markets lmao. i think bill was giving some really basic pushback that keota struggled to respond to because it sounds like he's been spending more time on twitter than actually reading about any of this in depth.
i also like mark fisher, but i think using Capitalist Realism in the way he does here is such a coping mechanism - you can't just say "uhhh it's actually really hard to imagine how socialism solves all these problems because the public imagination simply can't comprehend it."
It was painful for me, too. I couldn't have been prepared to address some of the points as eloquently as I would've preferred if I had tried. You just never know what points are going to be brought up when talking about a controversial subject, and I didn't take any poly sci classes or any speech & debate extra curriculars lol. It's also quite scary to go into a conversation knowing it will be made public for anyone and everyone to scrutinize. I'm still learning and trying to better understand the world around me, history & theory.
And i may have failed to do mark fisher justice if that's the takeaway you or anyone mightve had from my words on that podcast episode. My point in bringing him up, was the point of his book Capitalist Realism, which is simply that the vast majority of people lack the imagination for an alternative to capitalism, because any talk or platforming of anything that even resembles an alternative have been snuffed out of our lexicon, our TV & film, media, vocabularies in general, etc. In no way was I intending to say "people are stupid and that's why they lack the imagination", nor is it a cop out by any stretch of the imagination, just a fact that most people in the US & in the West are not already familiar with alternative models of running society (besides capitalism), so it makes it very difficult to even bridge that gap and have a conversation about it.
I'm always open to talking with whomever about it & trying to learn and grow together with others, so my dms are always free if you ever wanna push my buttons, pick my brain, or challenge any of my ideological talking points 😘. I say all this in good faith as well, although it is ofc vewwy scawwy to have conversations like this, especially publically or in front of any sort of audience, regardless of whether it's live or pre-recorded (like this podcast episode).
Also P.S. there was no warm up or pre interview before this podcast episode lol, I think that's probably somewhat clear by how clumsy the whole thing felt. & I was literally JUST starting to feel comfortable and quick by the last 20 minutes, but by then it was too late lol
Hmmmm.... 🤔
If only there were no profit incentives......? If you were in charge we would all starve to death. Whenever you don't know what you're talking about you insert the phrase "under our current conditions". The problem you are experiencing is related to central banks controlling your currency. Not capitalism. Capitalism is just trading voluntarily. No one forces you to work and you own your body and your labor. "If everyones needs were met". So you mean if you can wield government to point guns at individuals and force them to work to get your basic needs met... Under communism you're a farmer if you're lucky. Not a DJ playing at music festivals.