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Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Hillary and Freud and Marx's labor theory of value ?

Any right-wing types who want to believe that Hillary Clinton is some sort of Marxist are on the same intellectual level of a vocal few who think President Obama is an illegitimate president-perhaps even an illegal alien.

But Hillary is just my age and her conscious and subconscious mind had to be shaped by the late 60s. Back then the best and the brightest -in passionate opposition to the Vietnam War- had to be familiar with Marxist criticism of the capitalist system - simply as an academic necessity.

Marxists certainly do not perceive our ruling class- very much the dominant OWNING class- as benign JOB CREATORS. Without personal malice, Marxists perceive the ONE PERCENT as an exploiting class, even if this exploitation is perfectly legal (by bourgeois law, of course).

It still amazes me- still very much influenced by Marx- that the labor theory of value was not a knock out blow to obfuscating capitalist FREE MARKET ideology. When I first grasped it as a mere adolescent, I thought it had all the cogency of a PROOF in Euclidean Plane Geometry. A logical proof is the exact opposite of some totalitarian dogma. For example, there are nearly 100 proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem: the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal in area to the sum of the squares on the legs. For a while a few months ago I imagined that I myself had conceived a new and most elegant proof of this basic theorem. But I soon discovered this "new" proof in my old high school geometry text.

Today I suspect that modern computers-given all the truthful and relevant data -might easily produce a 21st century PROOF of Karl Marx's labor theory of value. But too many middle class intellectuals are unmotivated to undermine the capitalist profit system, seeing themselves perhaps are already very comfortable and privileged.

Old Freud with his ID, EGO, and SUPER-EGO, I suspect, can explain this "resistance" and hostility to a class embarrassing TRUTH.

When I heard Hillary Clinton yesterday say in so many words that CAPITAL does not create JOBS, I was flabbergasted ! So was the capitalist news media. She quickly retracted the statement.

But was Hillary's 1960s shaped UNCONSCIOUS MIND whispering the simple truth to her ear? The rest of the liberal Democrats continue to fawn over our divine JOB CREATORS.

But their very condition for job creation is MAKING A PROFIT. That something just needs to be done, public housing or national health care, for example, is not a factor in frenzied stock market investing.

Like all science economic science must deal with objectively measurable quantities.  Science has only one way to measure human EFFORT - physical or mental- the consumption of calories. It is pure superstition to believe that the ONE PERCENT are so much more productive than the entire producing class of employed labor.

The correct measure of our total wealth and our total social surplus value- which really pays all the bills- is LABOR TIME.

Just a bit of common sense: A guy who never heard about Marx's labor theory of value would never TRADE a commodity he had to work a whole year for- say a car- for some other commodity- say a new refrigerator which brand new would only COST IN TIME only one week of his job place labor.

It is the PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION which makes all PRIVATE WEALTH possible. The bourgeois lawyers will see to it that it remains LEGAL wealth. So the working class is plundered indeed HONORABLY- in accordance with our Majestic Laws. For our vast class of working stiffs every day is Plunder Dome Day.

Should exploitation become all too obvious ,even to the relatively content working-middle class, the capitalist system will face a crisis of legitimacy. It would begin to look like the Great French Revolution of 1789.

With reference to Sigmund Freud, will our COLLECTIVE ID make peaceful revolution impossible?

 

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Ron