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Great article. At the risk of fear mongering, the point about supermarkets was very powerful. "Greed is good" is fine until the money controls the entire infras

Great article. At the risk of fear mongering, the point about supermarkets was very powerful. "Greed is good" is fine until the money controls the entire infrastructure of society. I live in Argentina, where so many factories were abandoned in our 2001 crisis that workers decided to re-open many of them. Would American workers have it in them if there were a serious liquidity crisis?

olewhalehunter 11y ago
>Would American workers have it in them if there were a serious liquidity crisis? Asian real estate tycoons would own the area before the workers could pronounce "transpacific capital monitoring". much less before they were told factory was being shut down.
- wavefunction 11y ago
  All I have to say to that sort of apocalyptic scenario is that possession is nine tenths of the law. Hard for 'Asian Tycoons' to be absentee landlords, were they to try.
anigbrowl 11y ago
The problem with this is that a factory making stuff is useless if people don't want or can't afford the product. The Marxist labor theory of value asserts that value s created when something is made rather than sold, but 1000 pairs of shoes sitting in a warehouse miles away from any consumers who might want to wear them aren't making anyone better off.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  More accurately its that the value is set by the labor required. Beyond that for most people in a capitalist system, the basic process was one of commodity > money > commodity. Meaning that people made stuff to earn money, to buy more stuff. But for the capitalists instead it was money > commodity > money+. Putting money into the production of stuff so as to earn even more money on sales. Now where Marx went off the rails was with factory machines. He was sadly working under the preconception that workers were being exploited, and so ended up badly muddling the impact machinery has on the value definition.

olewhalehunter 11y ago

>Would American workers have it in them if there were a serious liquidity crisis? Asian real estate tycoons would own the area before the workers could pronounce "transpacific capital monitoring". much less before they were told factory was being shut down.

wavefunction 11y ago
All I have to say to that sort of apocalyptic scenario is that possession is nine tenths of the law. Hard for 'Asian Tycoons' to be absentee landlords, were they to try.

anigbrowl 11y ago

The problem with this is that a factory making stuff is useless if people don't want or can't afford the product. The Marxist labor theory of value asserts that value s created when something is made rather than sold, but 1000 pairs of shoes sitting in a warehouse miles away from any consumers who might want to wear them aren't making anyone better off.

digi_owl 11y ago
More accurately its that the value is set by the labor required. Beyond that for most people in a capitalist system, the basic process was one of commodity > money > commodity. Meaning that people made stuff to earn money, to buy more stuff. But for the capitalists instead it was money > commodity > money+. Putting money into the production of stuff so as to earn even more money on sales. Now where Marx went off the rails was with factory machines. He was sadly working under the preconception that workers were being exploited, and so ended up badly muddling the impact machinery has on the value definition.