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brokenhead," I find it very hard to take you seriously with that name. By any chance, will you provide your first name so I can pay you at least that degree of respect in future?
You are incapable of seeing a bigger picture.
I suppose you’re about to prove that, then:
What Victor is telling you is that wealth is not a conserved quantity. Human labor has created wealth.
I don’t know why Victor would go to such great lengths just to tell someone defending Marx that human labour has created wealth.
You are saying that the arbitrage of which he is speaking leaves no trace of anything of value (1).
No, it’s the stutter in your thinking that has produced this result.
I said that arbitrage is the manipulation of wealth and, it follows, has value
only in that context (2). Victor is arguing that it creates wealth—at least, that’s apparently my misguided impression of the events, so far. Consequently, I assume that you’re now going to show me from what follows how the above statements marked 1 and 2 mean the same thing.
In what sense are tunnels beneath rivers and channels and buildings that reach the sky without lasting value?
I haven’t discussed such a thing as “lasting value” (assets). I have primarily been debating the nature of the commodity.
How do you plan to use
assets as commodities to defend the argument that arbitrage
CREATES rather than manipulates wealth?
No one is arguing that there is any such thing as permanence in an absolute sense. But it is just this fact that goods and services have values that are spatially and temporally relative which makes the creation of wealth possible.
I don’t see how any of your thinking follows or is anywhere near the actual point at hand. So, I shall just have to take them at face---value.
You say: Victor is arguing for wealth
as a variable quantity that has been created by human labour. Further, you say, he is arguing that
because value itself is “spacetime-relative,” the creation of wealth is possible.
From this, I can only conclude that there are two ways to
create wealth, 1) through the value of human labour (mental and physical) in the present, relative to 2) through the value of human labour (mental and physical) in the future.
How does it follow that arbitrage CREATES rather than MANIPULATES wealth?
The chickens are not wealth.
No, they’re very well done by now. Do try to stay fresh.
Feeding them, tending them, and slaughtering them creates the wealth.
Well, yes, that’s my argument, actually.
They are no good on the killing floor to anyone, so getting from there to point B also creates wealth.
Oh, well—since you’ve asserted it
creates wealth rather than manipulates it, it must be true.
To bring the argument accurately up-to-date, Victor is arguing that arbitrage
creates wealth “by excising inefficiency from the system.” This particular argument developed as the result of the following premise, paraphrased from Marx: Nature
not ideas as the source of wealth. Such a statement really has broad implications, and Marx does indeed expand upon them.
Back to Victor’s modular notion of arbitrage CREATING wealth: in any given healthy economy (where income and expenditure are essentially equal; when the population is mostly employed, eating, feeding and sleeping well—looking after its own), arbitrage/trade excises inefficiency by providing for needs that would otherwise have imbalanced that equality; i.e., by supplying necessary products at an “affordable price.” Note that it doesn’t matter how much that economy is making in terms of $.
Now, let’s take an unhealthy economy (limited natural resources, high unemployment, etc.)—oh, say, Bolivia and the IMF’s “structural adjustment program” (and I will come back to say more about it specifically but leave it with you for the moment for contemplation in the following context).
Remembering that the fundamental idea behind Marxist theory is
the materialist conception of history (aka, historical materialism). Consequently, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Marx). What this very simply means is that, for example, “noble” and “proletarian” existences are not
the product of men’s consciousness. Rather, men’s
social existence determines their consciousness.
Anyone who knows
Marx (and it is very clear to me, ironically even in his recent posts on other issues, that Victor absolutely does not), further understands the contradiction between the
member of civil society and the citizen—they further understand Marx’s distinction between
political and
human emancipation (
the emancipation of man from himself):
Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person—Marx.
Of course, examined as it is
in its historical context, the term “political emancipation” refers to the emancipation (and modern social relations) brought about by the French and American
revolutions and crystalised in the form of the Rights of Man and the Rights of the Citizen. Historically, revolution is the
development, the political emancipation of man, FROM the feudal system of social relations (“natural man” [therefore, innate consciousness] appearing as relations in the system of estates, guilds, etc, and
as privilege) TO a capital system of social relations (“natural man” as bourgeoisie, private interest, independent individual
by law). FROM, “in the name of the King” TO “We the People.”
Political emancipation delivers man
as a divided subject—concrete (egoistic) and abstract (political) man. The “rights of man” appear as “
natural” rights clearly not because they are, in fact, absolute, universal and/or inalienable but precisely because
the conscious activity of men is concentrated on the
political act [this is a key point!]. As a result, the passive, egoistic “man,” the member of civil society—the
unpolitical man—appears as “natural man,” and: “the true man is recognized only in the shape of the abstract citizen”—Marx.
Human emancipation, then, can only occur when man himself ceases to separate social power from himself
in the shape of political power.
You want to talk big picture, eh? Stop playing with small fry.
Back to address the balance ASAP.
