[P2P-F] [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: Update from the Office of Jeremy Rifkin

Mon Apr 13 02:06:34 CEST 2015

In most cases, marginal cost is never zero. But in many cases, it is
too small to matter. That's why there's too much spam on the Internet
for instance.

In occasional cases, marginal cost can be negative, leading to negative
prices. (The seller will pay you to accept their product.) This is the
case in some electricity generating plants (nuclear or coal) when it is
cheaper for them to pay the grid to dispatch their output than to
shut down, which happens when there's too much wind or sun.

Depending on one's approach to farming, one can have in certain specific
cases, not only zero but also negative marginal cost even in
agriculture.

It is hard to talk of these things in general terms. There's a whole
range of different cases.

Roberto 

 On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 19:47:53 +0200
Orsan <orsan1234 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> > 2. Rifkin's Zero Margin Cost story has a lot of holes, as
> > criticized here:
> > http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/contra-rifkin-1-food-and-manufacturing-will-never-be-zero-marginal-cost/2014/09/30
> > (I hate to quote Eric Raymond, with whom I fundamentally disagree
> > on most things, but I do agree with a lot of that.)
> 
> Thanks Bob, this is indeed going into the core problem. The rejection
> of 'cost-of-production' in the 'subjective theory of value' developed
> by Teacher and thought father of Hayek and Missest, not himself a
> conservative, yet ideas founded 'marginalist revolution'; Carl
> Menger: 
> 
> Carl Menger (German: [ˈmɛŋɐ]; February 23, 1840 – February 26, 1921)
> was the founder of the Austrian School of economics. Menger
> contributed to the development of the theory of marginalism,
> (marginal utility), which rejected the cost-of-production theories of
> value, such as were developed by the classical economists such as
> Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
> 
> The historical links as such important, not only memory wise but also
> increase our awareness and consciousness when we are looking at. So I
> was just keep going searching and thinking about Tektology, Hayek, so
> on, then started to think about Rifkin's zero 'marginal cost' story,
> where it is coming from and where it is heading to. 
> 
> There are more info and good links here in Wikipedia:
> http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Menger about Merger, the official
> founder of 'Austrian Schools of Economics'. The entire project is
> launched to overcome the 'normative' perspectives dominating
> socialist movements, focusing to much on the 'costs-of-production',
> especially form the perspective of workers and citizens thinking
> irrelevant issues as injustice, labour exploitation, and
> environmental destruction. This looking at economy from people's
> point of, instead of capitalist point of view was very objectivist
> and annoying. They needed science that is totally ethics free. So he
> comes up, together with Jevon's and Walras's contributions, with a
> revolutionary 'universal' pure scientific economic vision called
> marginalism, based on utility based value of the last piece consumed
> by consumer.  This became the motto of mainstream academic teachings,
> from psychology, to sociology, and served for disciplining all
> marginalists expect this sort  :) 
> 
> For further info on marginalists, the historical context it emerged
> in: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism#History
> 
> With an apology, should say here too ties take us to the underlying
> distinction in methodological and philosophical debates, fights, or
> class wars.. Which were dividing the lines between as follows:
> Hegel's Idealism > Fuerbach's materialism > Marx' historical and
> dialectic materialism > Mach's idealist subjective energetism > and
> Bogdanov's final synthesis in Tektology. Then a long pause of
> revolution, wars and fascism. 
> 
> Menger being influenced by all these debates and political climate
> proposes his ideas of me materialism to oppose normative value theory
> of labour, exactly on 1871, year of commune in Paris. Being not a
> pure scientific theory, but a class act to counter Marxian vision
> ants politics that seeks more egalitarian society defines the
> normative aspects of the marginalizers' mission, not less then
> Marxist value theory was. 
> 
> Previous and Later developments, shows how ideas, politics,
> production, costs, are forming and interacting in space-time
> historically.. Innovations being taken from adversaries and turned
> around.. Causing transformation in class and power structures,
> identities, struggles, and relationships in and out multi-layered and
> multi-dimensional complexes moving and chaining in space time.. 
> 
> So actually Michel, and Ervin Lazslo are quite correct when they
> criticize Ken Wilber's cult version of Integral analyses, and others
> influenced Wilber by being ahistorical. That ahistorical-ness comes
> from Merger's tradition, and a hand trick by Hayek, a pick pocketing
> of an methodology developed by a Bolshevik. World should not know
> about this. Hayek promoted himself as the smartest guy, trained
> Friedman and Rand, influenced Popper, Soros, behavioralism and
> neoliberalism, libertarian and techno utopian capitalists of
> California and  Silicon Valley's Singularists. While what stolen,
> actually has been inspiring entire spectrum of countering forces,
> good hackers, environmentalists, squatters, queers, situationists,
> and other utopian or not systemic critics of capitalism. The unity
> problem we are tackling is not the unity of 100 percent, but the 99
> percent. That is why instead of an a-historic integral version of it,
> we need historical, absolute humanist, and recovered version of a
> 'global' dialectical methodology..
> 
> Orsan
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 