Leyla Shen wrote:You don’t know what the fuck you are talking about and we’d fair better if you’d simply be honest about it.
Oh, I think I do, quite a bit better than you. You were the one who wrote that the merchant doesn't create value, after all.
None of this, of course, is contrary to—let alone being a coherent argument against—any aspect of Marxist philosophy and, therefore, Marxism since Marxism itself is exactly about how value affects the relationship between people, things and other people (social relations).
So do you retract your moronic quip that arbitrage doesn't create value?
Getting to the sheer balls of it, the distinction to be made between Marx and Hegel
is totally irrelevant here, dummy. I am not a hegelian. In fact, I wouldn't give a fuck about Hegel if you paid me for it. I find the continental philosophy to be largely laughable, with a few exceptions. I know you people obsess over these ludicrous battles (idealistic vs. materialistic dialectic! Watch Marx and Hegel duke it out behind the chemical sheds!), but your obsession is spilling over into the real world.
The information you speak of, boy-ie, would of course be useless and couldn't even exist without the things!
Right, girlie. Which is why I said that it takes
both the craftsman and the trader to create value.
it's like software and hardware -- one without the other is useless. A dead computer is useful as a doorstop or for materials salvage. A dead operating system is useful as a creepy sort of puzzle ('what would have happened if we flipped
this bit?) it takes both -- the conjunction of hardware and software -- to accomplish computation. Similarly, it takes both manufacture and trade to produce value and wealth.
If other marxists are as slow as you are, your loss becomes all that much more explicable.
The thing is the reason for the information. Thus, the thing contains relative (not intrinsic or absolute) value to all concerned by or with it irrespective of whether the thing, comprised of multiple renewable and/or non-renewable natural resources or otherwise, has also as part of its makeup human thought (as in the case of your example, gundpowder). I mean, they didn't just come up with the idea in their heads as a fait accomplis and THEN pull gunpowder out of their arses, ya know! They had STUFF to work with.
Girlie, I never denied that value depends on things; quite the contrary. You are the only one in denial here. my claim has consistently been that it takes
both things and information, both manufacture and trade, to create value.
You have to go through incredible mental contortions to maintain that 'the thing contains ... value to all concerned by or with it' -- obviously it must also be those
potentially concerned (such as my aforementioned warlord is
potentially concerned with gunpowder, though he doesn't yet know what it is) -- otherwise the trader, by dint of actualizing potential relationships between things and people, would create value, and you denied this. It follows then that every person in the world could have different individual concern with the thing, so it must contain potential values for everyone. Of course any
combination of people in the world could have different potential concerns with it, so the thing must in fact contain a thing-value pairs not just for each person, but for the powerset of people in the world -- and it must do the same for other things, because things in conjunction might possess wholly different value than things apart! And each time a new person is born or a new thing made, the size of this powerset would expand exponentially.
What marvelous things they are, these marxist relative-value-containing things!
What amazing delusions people must pursue in order to deny that arbitrage creates wealth as surely as manufacture!
What i am saying, kiddo, is that value is not a property of
things, it's a property of
relations (between people and things). Kinda like velocity is not a property of
objects, it's a property of the relationships between objects and observers. Think of it as "The Theory of Relativity of Value". Join the fucking 20th century at least, if you can't manage 21st.
So you keep asserting in order to escape the immediate need for relevant supporting arguments
I
gave you supporting arguments, but it seems you are too dense -- or too dishonest -- to understand them.
As a philosopher, you possess the depth and gaudy, impersonal character of a pauper-come-professional-gambler whose only connection to the real world and people is through asserting the virtues of hedging one’s bets in tinsel town, deliberately (but not quite so smart as to be calculatingly) aloof to the depravity required to sustain it.
It is very amusing, to be berated for insufficient involvement with the world by a
marxist. It's kinda like being mauled by a vicious wild lawn flamingo. Big claws, big teeth!
You people live in a delusion.