wheresmysurplusvalue [comrade/them]

Could the AWOL status be a way to prevent payouts to families of soldiers KIA?

You’re absolutely right, yes I think with all things held constant (intensity of labor, technology, stable environment, etc) then the socially-necessary labor time should be constant. I was thinking it’d be cool if, in this code implementation, the SNLT could be calculated for a given commodity using its entire supply chain. So each commodity keeps track of its inputs and the labor added when converting the inputs into the commodity. The SNLT for a commodity would be calculated recursively by summing the added labor plus the SNLT of all of its inputs.

Commodity: 1 apple pie

• Added Labor = 30 min
• Inputs = {1 apple, 100g sugar, 250g flour, 5g cinnamon, 20g butter}
• SNLT = 30 min + SNLT(Inputs)

Commodity: 100g sugar

• Added Labor = 5 minutes (idk made up)
• Inputs = {some fraction of a combine harvester, water, things needed to process sugar…}
• SNLT = 5 minutes + SNLT(Inputs)

Commodity: 250g flour

• Added Labor = 1 minute (at industrial scale)
• Inputs = {some fraction of a flour mill, seeds, pesticide, …}
• SNLT = 1 minute + SNLT(Inputs)

and so on. As I write this, I’m realizing this would lead to some chicken-and-egg problems, similar to how the process of making yogurt involves taking some yogurt, adding milk and heat to get more yogurt. I’ll have to think about this.^[1]

But with this model, it would be possible to interrogate the data and maybe build some graphs.

But I’m not just interested to build graphs, I was also hoping it’d help me better understand what is “simple average labor.” Marx says that human labor in all its particular kinds is abstracted into abstract labor of an average intensity and skill. Are we able to more precisely define what that means? I feel like a formalization could help give precision on things like that. For example, can “skill” be quantified? Could we tell if the average skill increases or decreases over time? That could have relevance in later chapters when Marx talks about de-skilling, maybe this would be a neat connection.

I didn’t make much progress after this post, and I started to think that it would be too complicated. For example, I got into the section of Ch 1 about the simple commodity form and the development of the money commodity. Trying to formalize this would be quite tricky because I don’t even know how one would go about making types for this:

1. In an exchange relation of commodity A with commodity B, the relative form of A is pure value, while the equivalent form of B is the physical embodiment of abstract human labor.
2. The expanded form of commodity A with all such commodities B means that the physical body which represents abstract human labor (equivalent form) takes on as many different forms as there are commodities B.
3. Flip the directions: Represent all commodities A using the same equivalent form commodity B, so that a single commodity B becomes the physical embodiment of abstract human labor in the exchange with all such A.
4. The money commodity is the commodity B which is used in practice, e.g. gold or silver.

I think it would need some kind of “Exchange” type which includes a Relative field (type Commodity) and an Equivalent field (type Commodity). There could be some function ConvertToEquivalent which takes the “internal” value of labor-time in the Relative commodity, and returns a new commodity with the same internal labor-time expressed as a different commodity (the Equivalent). This would be steps 1 and 2.

To develop step 3, add a function ExchangeValue which simply takes 2 commodities and divides their internal value (units of labor-time) and returns a unitless ratio.

The part I have not figured out is how to really express the concept of socially necessary labor-time. Intuitively, this should be some kind of function which takes information external to the commodity, maybe some kind of lookup table for the SNLT of all commodities at a given snapshot in time. But I wonder if there is some more elegant way to calculate this lookup table using purely the information in the type system, rather than just axiomatically assuming it?

This is where I start to feel out of my depth, but it does help me try to clarify it for myself!

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To ? 🤞

For this reading, I’m trying to really diagram out the categories as they are developed, to check if I really understand it. So I tried to implement the categories as data types in Haskell-ish pseudocode, but unfortunately this proved to be more tricky than I thought. Has anyone tried doing something like this, i.e. mathematically formalizing Marxian categories into something like a type system?

I found this really interesting thread on /r/SocialistProgrammers, which seems to discuss something similar. However, I’m not trying to capture the full dynamism of Hegelian logic. I just want to take a snapshot of Marx’s categories at different points in the book for diagramming purposes, to show how the categories are connected. I imagine it could be visualized some way for pedagogical purposes.

Cuba-cool and JucheKorea-cool but with sunglasses instead of fire