Topic on Talk:Surplus-value

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Article overhaul

4
Forte (talkcontribs)

Comrade @Comwik, I've noticed some of your contributions, especially those imported from Communist Wiki, often distinguishes itself from the rest of ProleWiki articles, both in style and in content. Most articles imported from the other wiki have numerous discursive passages instead of descriptive. And usually the discursive passages come with no reference for their claims, which can sometimes affect the reliability of the article. I'll give a few examples. From the Surplus-value article:

Thurow goes on to note that "When it comes to actually measuring profits, some difficult accounting issues arise." Why? Because after deduction of costs from gross income, "It is hard to say exactly how much must be reinvested to maintain the size of the capital stock".
This is obviously a theory very different from Marx's. In Thurow's theory, the aim of business is to maintain the capital stock. In Marx's theory, competition, desire and market fluctuations create the striving and pressure to increase the capital stock; the whole aim of capitalist production is capital accumulation, i.e. business growth maximising net income.
The goal of a communist society is to be classless, which means there is no one to appropriate surplus value from anyone else. This means everyone owns the full produce of their labour.

(this last passage not only reproduces a point critiqued by Marx in Critique of Gotha Program, [the Lassallean "proceeds of labor"] but it also mentions communism as a goal in article about surplus-value, showing how some parts of the article is structured like an argument instead of focusing on what surplus-value actually is)

Besides that, the surplus-value article has excessive content which could be discarded. For instance the "Marcus' dialectics" section has this passage which is humorously off-topic:

This is related to Marcus's employment of concepts of becoming that were stressed by Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers including Descartes and Kant, and, later, by Hegel and Marx. Marcus sees the concepts as having regretably fallen into disuse and miscomprehension because of the present dominance of the Humean, empiricist mode of thinking. As an example, if we consider infinity using the concept of becoming, "rather than defining perfection and infinity as a succession of fixed occurrences, rather than conceiving of these as a succession of discrete events which apocalyptically, asymptotically converge on a predetermined maximal value, the infinite must be seen as as the immediate aspect of current development that expresses an energizing, determining principle of self-development."

The next paragraph even acknowledges how it tends to be off-topic:

While all this may seem arcane and tangential, at issue is what Marx meant by value (and surplus value), and whether those concepts are valid. These questions have been the subject of enormous debate

The article also cites quite often how Marx considered the pursuit of surplus-value "to be the driving force behind the capitalist economy." I don't question this has been said, and it makes sense, but I have no idea where this was said. There are no sources for this claim.

There are other articles which you have imported that I have seen the same issue, and my advice is instead of importing all of it to ProleWiki, to include only parts of it which is more relevant to the subject. Excessive content in the article can hamper the reading.

I ask your permission to overhaul this article and modify entirely or even remove some parts. Since it was mainly your work, I thought it'd be nicer to ask your permission on it. For now, I'd like to focus on the surplus-value article, but I will later address other articles facing the same issue

Comwik (talkcontribs)

No problem. Edit away.

Also, I'll be more selective when importing Communpedia material. into Prolewiki. There's a bigger difference in style than I realised at first.

I think you should consider keeping the Lyn Marcus material though. -- Comrade Comwik (talk) 20:34, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Forte (talkcontribs)

I ended up removing the Lyn Marcus material because what he discusses (surplus-value, constant capital, variable capital) is already discussed in previous sections, mainly the "Theory" one

Forte (talkcontribs)

Alright, comrade. I'll try preserving it