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i have considered responding to this thread, but find the little experiment in the op to be incoherent. i understand it to have been spun out of the discussion about walmart exploiting economies of scale unfairly---ace seemed to have difficulty with this notion that not all firms are equivalent as a function of differences in scale, and so posed this problem that eliminates scale as a problem.
in the op model, abstract variables (firms) produce an undefined commodity.
nothing is defined about how that production is organized--modes of organization are treated as if they do not matter in principle--which is absurd if you are actually trying to think about production practices and strategies.
the rules of the economic game are not defined--apparently in this fictional land of econ 101, you can assume that the metaphysics of capitalism are such that one can arbitrarily move in and out of the scenario provided in order to locate legal and/or institutional parameters that enable your argument to function.
the reverse of this apparently also obtains: competition is assumed to be shaped by something on the order to natural laws--ok so if not natural then mechanical--economic activity is a kind of hydraulics--an action on the part of one actor is assumed to result in a reciprocal action from another. this assumption has to be in place if the erasure of the organization of production as a factor is to be coherent--that is if this erasure is not to grind the game immediately to a halt.
within this game, labor costs are a variable cost: so it is assumed that firms can treat workers like they treat other forms of overhead and that no particular issues follow from eliminating or deskilling the workforce. without making stipulations as to types of production, all that is happening in the op in this regard is a kind of strange little test the function of which is to see how disposable you, as hypothetical capitalist, understand the workers to be--you know, workers---the people who actually make the commodities that your profit margins rely on.
so there is a way in which these little "thought experiments" function to help you as hypothetical capitalist to rationalize elimination of people's modes of livelihood in the interest of protecting your own profits.
in this regard, it is little more than a version of comuter games that get you used to blasting other human being to atoms with death rays.
underneath this is a refusal to accept the simple fact that capitalist economic activity is a type of social activity, that there is no coherent separation between the economy and the wider social formations within which economies operate.
and this separation of the economy into a special zone of human activity, one that floats above society and history, governed by a special metaphyics of capitalist competition, is at the origin of most of the more obviously self-defeating tendencies of capitalist activity.
the treatment of workers as things----as dehumanized, as simply a type of technology that can be thrown away once "market forces" render them "obsolete" or at the whim of management----or as a response to the only Law that capital takes to be meaningful--its own profits--is generally not isolated--it is generally of a piece with assumptions about consumers, about the social formations that surround both firms and consumers (for example) that treat everything as a means to an end. that end is profit.
so the allegorical game presented in the op is incoherent unless you accept a whole series of assumptions that ace did not spell out----and unless you bring into the game assumptions concerning when and how you can step outside the rules and refer to social factors in order to make the game coherent. so it puts folk who consider the game into the position of having to create coherence for themselves in order to play---but because the game leans on econ 101 modelling practices, players find this importing of information to be simply the way in which one plays this sort of game and not a problem with the game itself.
all this is very strange and on another morning would not be worth my time to explain. for better or worse, it is friday and the sun is out and so it seems interesting, in a fleeting kinda way.
o yes--i am neither a conservative or a "liberal"--the conservative mode of parsing politics and the categories that it relies on is also incoherent.
but whatever.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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