Tag: theory

Also like once upon a time I was one of those people who was really dismissive of theory

And then I started reading theory and like… it gave me so many incredible and nuanced ways to describe my situation and the world around me, and gave me so many frameworks for analyzing situations and what not… that I can only say… read theory, and like I know academic language is dense and a pain in the ass sometimes, but like, once you get through the layer of dense academic language it’s like reading the secrets the bourgeoisie have been trying to keep from you all your life.

Strange to think that even today, when confronted with the autonomy of the Black movement or the autonomy of the women’s movement, there are those who talk about this “dividing the working class.” Strange indeed when our experience has told us that in order for the working class to unite in spite of the divisions which are inherent in its very structure‐factory versus plantation versus home versus schools‐those at the lowest levels of the hierarchy must themselves find the key to their weakness, must themselves find the strategy which will attack that point and shatter it, must themselves find their own modes of struggle.

Selma James – Sex, Race and Class

Quick Explanation Of The Labor Theory Of Value

The labor theory of value is the idea that the value of stuff comes from the average amount of work required to make/get it.

So like gold being scarce takes more labor time because you spend a lot of time looking for it, and then a lot of time refining it once you do find it which makes it more expensive and like modern agricultural techniques mean a bushel of wheat takes less labor time than ever and is thus cheap.

The labor of learning to do/make the thing is part of the labor time involved in the thing, so if it requires a lot of training to do, it’s more expensive.

Labor is defined as socially necessary labor: meaning that the average amount of time required to do/make the thing is what counts which is why dolls assembled by takes-way-too-long-assembling-dolls-Bob aren’t more expensive than those assembled by really-speedy-at-a-assembling-dolls-Pat.

Also socially necessary labor is determined by how much of a thing society actually wants which is why no matter how many hours you spend making a statue of Elvis out of cow manure you probably won’t get paid anything for it because society probably didn’t want that and never will.

Incidentally the socially necessary labor thing is also why Ralph Lauren t-shirts cost four times the price of a normal t-shirt, because society has decided that the labor of many highly trained professionals creating and maintaining the idea of Ralph Lauren is something they want and so that labor is socially necessary weirdly.

Also when society makes too much of something the price temporarily drops below its actual value and when society makes too little it rises above its actual value but that’ll correct itself.

Classical Economic Theory Works So Beautifully if You Fail To Account For People Being People

Markets might sorta work if we were rational actors, but we’re not.  We just aren’t, the invisible hand of the market is guided by mass human irrationality which is why it keeps smearing shit all over the walls and putting tiny chefs hats on geese.  And like the thing is the system is so irrational that even if *you* are rational it forces you to act irrationally to survive within it.  

Like what we’ll pay for something or agree to be paid for shit has SO much more to do with prior experience, the lighting and a bunch of other bizarro factors than it does with laws of “supply and demand” and shit.

This is why behavioral economics is a crucially important field.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely covers this really well but his conclusions are really liberal (and wrong) but he lays out a bunch of studies that point out some interesting shit.