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Originally Posted by roachboy
i have considered responding to this thread, but find the little experiment in the op to be incoherent.
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Personally I don't respond to the incoherent, why do you?
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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.
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What I have difficulty with is the notion that a corporation is often considered "bad" when the corporation does what it need to do to survive.
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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.
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The model is not the point of the OP. What I want to understand is given a business problem that may lead to a negative impact on employment, how people with different political leanings would respond. My gut tells me that most people would respond the same given the exact same set of circumstances. If that is true then how do you explain the views that some posters have toward business?
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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.
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I find beauty in simplicity, I fully understand that many do not.
I assume a basic understanding of the rules of economics.
True, the OP is fictional, but I can point to hundreds of real companies who have had to deal with the kind of problem outlined in the OP. If this were an MBA course we could spend a full semester on a real business scenerio, but this is not an MBA course. In fact - I am about at the limits of my attention span as it is.
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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.
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I wanted this to be open ended. Giving those interested in responding the ability to make some of their own assumptions. You could have taken the scenerio in any direction you wanted. I admit failure. There was not much creativity in the responses, and I am sure that is my fault.
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within this game, labor costs are a variable cost:
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In most business situations familiar to me, labor is a variable cost.
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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.
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If you make that assumption, that is your decision. I have not directly stated how I would respond to the scenerio. There may be ways to respond that I have not considered, hence the open-ended question.
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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.
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I remember in the early 80's - I had a Commodore 64 computer. I purchased a very simplistic game titled - Themal Nuclear War". In the game you could obtain an arsenal and start a war, and hope to win or not start a war and hope to win if the computer started one. You could build an offensive or defensive arsenal. You could avoid building an arsenal and hope your computer opponent did the same or simply would not attack, etc,etc In all there were about 10 variables and time, to this day it was one of my all-time favorite games and it was just a grid, x's o's and a few other characters. I could have harped on the assumptions put into the game my choice was to enjoy the game. You seem to want to harp on the assumptions for some reason that I really don't understand. The developer of the game had an agenda as do I in my OP. They felt nuclear weapons proliferation would always lead to nuclear war and the death of millions. I would have loved to talk to the guys who wrote the game, but thats me. I don't have a problem with people who I disagree with.
My point here is that everyone has to do what is their best interests, because there is no free lunch. The world is either eat or be eaten. employees must be proactive and not take their jobs for granted. companies should not take things for granted either.
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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.
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I agree with you here. Not sure your basis for stating I have a "refusal"...
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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.
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What?!? I am just an average "Joe" who went to a state school. the above is way over my head.
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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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Did you ever state what you would do?