Karl Marx And His Work

You'd get executed.

>this is what commies actually believe

By who? For what?

>and technological advances make it easy enough to produce everything everyone needs.
it's these bullshit handwaves that kept me off marxism for good. that's still outright impossible even after a century and a half after marx

They're completely retarded. They genuinely think all of human behaviour can reset itself into some imaginary utopian ideal of cooperation.

You want a hundred jackets for example?
I don't know how this new form of production would work with the environment tho, I barely read this stuff so far, comrade.

No, I want to save up my wages, make good trades with people, and then have enough money to buy tons of hookers. How can I be stopped from accumulating tons of money if there's no state?

by the ruling hierarchy, since having a democracy is impossible
for your greed

I was more bugged by the fact that he thinks that we could have a planned economy if we really wanted.

>utopian ideal of cooperation.
We already co-operate, and that's how we survive. The interests of everyone is interconnected, it becomes "union of egoists" tier if you really want to stick with individualism.

So the ruling hierarchy are just guys with pistols? Or do they command some sort of army/executioner to kill me? What differentiates this from a state exactly?

Non-Agression Principle...wait, wrong delusional system.

We have already transitioned from feudalism to capitalism, my man. Imagine how strange that old world looks now.

We both cooperate and compete. We don't all solely cooperate; that wouldn't work; that's not human nature. Go take a look at other primates as well. You might find it very enlightening to actually observe the natural world.

>Marxist state
>state
The state structure serves one classes interests over another, so it's contradictory to say.
How can you even trade something that isn't privately owned? If you're going to trade it, then it's not even personal property of yours anymore. It's produced by labour and not privately owned to be traded off by one individual or more -- it's no longer produced for the purpose of being a commodity.

"Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning."

"In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal."

Both quotes are from marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

there's a reason the IWW had said "abolition of the wages system".

capitalism is a runaway system that leads to massive waste and unprecedented concentrations of power. Capitalism is not neutral, it has a logic of its own, abstract accumulation of capital is prioritised over everything else

hahaha, I remember watching some retarded Stefan Molyneux video where he was seriously arguing that in a 'free society' it would be impossible for an individual to amass arms because that would violate the NAP and everybody would join together to kick him or her out of society. Like an NAP bomb would go off in their brains and they'd all act automatically to 'diffuse the threat'. It was pretty fucking retarded, and Marxists are actually way worse, which is amazing.

>How can you even trade something that isn't privately owned? If you're going to trade it, then it's not even personal property of yours anymore. It's produced by labour and not privately owned to be traded off by one individual or more -- it's no longer produced for the purpose of being a commodity.

But what if I have it and someone wants it? And I'll give it to them in exchange for something else? And if they won't give me something else than I'll just keep it? What then?

>there's a reason the IWW had said "abolition of the wages system"
So what's the motivation to work really hard? To give 110%? To innovate, create new things, go out on a limb, etc, etc? Sounds like this Marxist utopian future means a bunch of bland shit all produced poorly in a factory and then given out very inefficiently. I'd rather just buy shit dude, even working minimum wage today I have access to more luxuries than Karl Marx could have dreamed of.

>unprecedented concentrations of power
it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficiente_di_Gini#/media/File:Gini_since_WWII.svg
>abstract accumulation of capital is prioritised over everything else
What are laws

>Low IQ:
Marx is against capitalism.
>Medium IQ:
Marx is in favour of communism.
>High IQ:
Marx is in favour of capitalism, which he views as a completely necessary historical period.

>there's a reason the IWW had said "abolition of the wages system"
Will there be, for example, restaurants under communism? How will I get to choose between good or bad restaurants? Will all restaurants be run by the state? Will there be any incentive for any of them to provide me with good food?

>Natural
It would be natural if we stayed in the primordial pond and evolved into pondscum as well.

It’s outright astonishing to me that anybody could actually think he was outright stupid or crazy or whatever. Like at the very least he did get a PhD in philosophy, could read, write, and speak German, French, and English, speak Yiddish, and read Latin and Ancient Greek. He knew his Shakespeare, Balzac, and Goethe, the fact that he refers to capitalists are Vampires, dead capital as zombies and so on reflects is awareness of the trend of gothic horror of authors like Mary Shelley. Entire studies have been written on analyzing all the cultural and literary references which are absolutely ripe in the first volume of Capital, in fact a recent marxologist has written a books trying to make a case that Marx structured Capital based on Dante, whom he loved. Marx also was scientifically literate, he knew calculus, he was an instant adopter and supporter of Darwin when Origin of Species was publish, in-fact seeing Darwin as providing massive support for his own Materialist Conception of History.

I say this just to make the point that even if you think he was basically wrong about everything, I think it’s impossible to argue that man was some sort of dunce.

His most important contribution, which I don’t think is diminished one bit today is the materialist conception of history. While I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Marx created a “science” is history, I think he can be fairly attributed with the creation of ‘history’ as a real academic discipline and not just well to draw human stories from. I constantly see the failure to include a material understanding of history in analysis in the news, politics, it’s everywhere, the inability to understand that forces of history have led to the present, and that there is no gap between the past and the present is a fundamental failure in how most people talk about and understand the world. I think the best proof of how good this aspect of Marxism is is clearly evident in how profoundly influential British 20th century Marxist historians, for a period of time even right wingers had to begrudgingly acknowledge that most of the best historians alive were Marxists.

But we evolved from apes. What's natural is the reality we inhabit. That reality doesn't allow for global, massive, and totally edenic cooperation. We're genuinely apes. Maybe in a few hundred billion ideas communism will be a good fit for human nature.

years*

>I think the best proof of how good this aspect of Marxism is is clearly evident in how profoundly influential British 20th century Marxist historians, for a period of time even right wingers had to begrudgingly acknowledge that most of the best historians alive were Marxists.

In the 20th century it wasn't blatantly obvious yet how retarded Marxism was. I still doubt your claim though. Also the ide

Everybody who is a Marxist should understand that Marx say capitalism as historically progressive, but ultimately had contradictions which would lead to a different system. This wouldn’t necessarily be socialism, but he hoped it would be. He recognizes there are not guarantees and that it’s not determined. Or I should say, he say the fall of capitalism as something that as eventually going to happen for sure, it’s what comes next where all bets are off. As he says ‘each mode of production either ends in one class coming to dominate the other, or their mutual ruin’. He fully acknowledges that everything is just destroyed is one possibility. ‘Socialism or barbarism’ as they say.

Human society has changed a lot, even recently in the last 100 years, you need to be a pretty stubborn traditionalist to claim human nature is unchangable.

Broke: Read Das Kapital by Marx, listen to chapo trap house, post on reddit and start taking tranny pills
Bespoke: Read SIEGE by James Mason and NOS by Miguel Serrano, be alpha as fuck, become NS revolutionary, kill your mailman and destroy ZOG

Goebbels also got a PhD in philosophy, so what?

ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/

Read Towards A New Socialism, it's the most workable and honest application of Marxist ideas towards a proposed socialist economy. There's no capitulation to markets, it takes the LTV seriously as a method of calculating production with modern computing. They convincingly show that the old arguments presented by anti-marxists in the "socialist calculation debate" are invalid, it is indeed possible to set up a complex planned economy. The only obstacle is one of political struggle, not some idiotic right-wing notion of human nature.

Would you say he was stupid? I wouldn’t. The question was about genius.

Shocking to me that anybody can read more than 10 pages of Esoteric Hitlerism and not recognize how transparent the con is.

To be specific, I mean the use of Historical Materialism as a methodology for historical analysis and writing, not Marxism writ large, which I guess would include his economic theory, philosophy, or politics.

Look up historians like Eric Hobsbawm, CLR James, Christopher Hill, Timothy Mason, GEM de Ste. Croix, EP Thompson, Brian Manning, Raphael Samuel, and George Rudé.

It is unambiguous and undeniable that for a long time Historical materialist as a historiographic method absolutely dominated and was completely setting the terms of the debates among historians. While not all the particular theories and theses all these people believed are still accepted, in the middle of the 20th century their work was unavoidable and clearly superior to work coming from anywhere else.

My roommate is finishing up his degree in history and he tells me that Marxism as a method is actually coming back in a big way because of its usefulness in historical analysis. Basically after Marxism went out of vogue, what replaced it was all sorts of postmodern nonsense, and weird particularist microhistories. He was showing me how people were writing what they called “sensory histories”, since after Marxism nobody felt confident enough to write any sort of narrative or explaination for anything, they instead turned to trying to give ‘sensory snapshots’ into what a place would have been like in a certain time period. Literally they had him reading a book about what 1890s Montreal would have “smelled like”. That’s history after Historical Materialism fell out of favor.

It’s a bit frustrating to me that many Marxists don’t take seriously how technology changes how we consider politics. To me something like blockchain clearly points towards not a future where everybody uses a crypto currency, but as the fundamental basis technology for making a distributed system for coordinating economic planning and accounting within it. In the near future it would be feasible to have a system where all purchases are automatically relayed to a distribution centre and when things get low a truck is automatically loaded and drives itself to the outlet.

>Shocking to me that anybody can read more than 10 pages of Esoteric Hitlerism and not recognize how transparent the con is.

I used to be like you kiddo. but the cultus garbage becomes pretty convincing after a while. There is an unspeakable power contained in esotericism and cultic ritual. I spend my days smoking weed, watching Manson videos and meditating on the Black Sun and the Archetype of the Fuhrer. My conviction is total and absolute, I am ready to Die for the Immortal Cause of Hitlerism and National Socialism.

The debates around the French Revolution are probably the best defence of Marxist historiography. A class-based approach dominated ever since Lefebvre and other based dudes hashed it out, and the main revisionist school has been a total mess, basically saying "it was very complex, we can't define a narrative". Well fuck that, apparently historical judgments are only okay if the matter is politically unquestionable.

>I don't understand the difference between personal property and private property or the means of production because I've never read Marx

Read Marx

Lol you had me going there for a second.

capitalists ignore things such as labor and power relationships for an utopia of abstract rationality where everyone gets to be his own enterpreneur somehow. Where are you going to get money to buy soylent capsules from Amazon if emperor Bezos has automated all production? Even if you ignore the imminent ecological and geopolitical collapse, and the fact its economically rational for the technocrat elite to depopulate us, your utopia implies an useless bugman existence my dude, trading shitcoins for a chance to buy Starwars XXIII merchandise of Amazon, all while being being under complete corporate surveillance

Here we see a classic example of the commie mind in the 21st century: I don't like the world, therefore the world is going to collapse.

People on lit take marxism seriously... This board has a lot of growing up to do.

>t. enlightened jordan peterson fan

This is so sad.

Every serious academic worth his salt takes Marxism seriously, my dude.
Even as a critic, it takes a wide reading to get properly acquainted with the Marxist tradition to offer a worthwhile rebuttal. As a Marxist I will gladly read any good critics, but they are so rare because they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Unless you're willing to put in the work to become the next Kolakowski, don't bother pretending you've refuted Marxism.

Maybe you aren’t that familiar with literature and its study but Marxist analysis is huge and continues to persist. Read Althusser or Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious is one of the greatest works of literary theory ever written. If you ever take a course of literary theory you will probably have the textbook written by Marxist Terry Eagleton. Why wouldn’t you expect Veeky Forums to take Marx seriously?

Also is there not no greater, more overt example of pure ideology then the imposition to “grow up”? ‘I am mature, unlike these child-like fool, because I have accepted the contingent structures of our society to be permanent, unchangable, and indeed natural.’ When you believe you’ve stepped ‘outside’ ideology, this is when you are in-fact deepest in its control.

Literally when smart people come to me (a Marxist) and ask what the best through introduction to Marxism is, I point them to Main Currents of Marxism. If they are just plebs there are other more basic introductions, but as far a reasonable advanced introduction, Kolakowski is the master. It’s a testament to his intellectual honesty and skill that he managed to write a book about Marxism that both it’s critics and supporters point to as being a landmark.

Meanwhile...

>never had a job
>supported by his rich best friend
How do marxshits defend this? Seriously.

lol

>journalism isn't a job
I guess those ~500 articles that he wrote for the New York Daily Tribune don't count.

>Was he intelligent?
No. Nothing he wrote came to be, he had no idea what he was talking about.

He was a NEET who lived off of his rich capitalist friend. Marxism is a joke that will never be taken seriously by anyone.

Marx = Failure

>the proletariat is going to overthrow capitalism
>the proletariat doesn't exist anymore
How do marxists cope with this?

>Repeats the same lie that he didn’t have a job..
Think about this, if you were coming up with revolutionary advances in political and economic thought, thought which threatened the ruling powers of the day, how else would you get support for that? It’s not like he could just get a university post, or any civil servant job. So he was a journalist for cash and by and large depended on a patron. One of the big points in Marxism is that you can’t just extract yourself from the system, it’s very nature means you have to play ball in some way.

It was definitely their allegiance to Marxism which led to pegging there whole financial system to oil, the fact in their economy which is fucking them...

>people who depend on the sale of their labour-power for a wage don't exist
Absolutely brutal, Marx is crying inside his grave right now wishing he could come back and become a liberal.

>Every worker is a proletarian
Mein sides

but that in fact proves Marx was indeed a hypocrite,motivated, mainly, by jealousy towards the real innovators and job creators of his time. Are you Marxists going to tell me the useless sub-80 iq proles working on retail contribute more to society than people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk?

>job creators
Has a more ideological term ever been invented?

Lol yeah, I am. All the thinking and “innovation”, they mean nothing without labour.

But besides that, Marx’s point isn’t a moral one, is a logical and economic one. When a class has a monopoly on the ownership of the means of production they don’t give wages which are equal to the value created by the worker, this is a coerced unequal exchange that underlies all capitalism and is the reason for massive accumulation. Marxists don’t begrudge management making money, a CEO does a legitimate job in maintainaing the function of a firm, they all deserve pay because they contribute to the production of the value of commodities. It’s the people who are mere “owners” and still for some reason feel entitled to anything.

>A new challenger appears

lol do you think jobs come from thin air?

that argument is rendered invalid by the fact we can replace the workers with robots. Face it, most people are useless eaters who produce nothing of worth

Do you think socialist countries that expropriated the capitalists didn't have jobs?

lmao they didn't even have food tbhh

Marx was a spoiled, self centered, and envious piece of shit and his philosophy reflects that. He didn't even give a shit about his mom dying because she stopped funding his layabout lifestyle when he was in his 30's.

>intelligent
yes
>genius
yes
>what went wrong
He was too romantic, too perfectionist, and far too empirically oriented. As far as life goes, his 'boils' apparently weren't boils, but some god awful disease that very few people have and is basically a living hell, so I don't hold his bum life as his fault.

>what went right
Grundrisse/Capital are the only work after Hegel which was genuinely Hegelian to the core.

yes and he crated the most advanced, complex and efficient mediatic system ever created at that point

Who, Goebbels?

he doesn’t sound a commie to me at all, you’re stupid. user is a situationist!

yes

>the proletariat doesn't exist anymore
sure, bud

just wait till we invent a robot able to disrupt the textile industry. Face it, the proletariat is in the way out, it's all about the enterpreneur and the innovator nowadays.

because we all can be enterpreneurs and innovators

only the smartest hardest working and most useful of us can aspire to such a thing. the rest should be thankful, accept their subordinate status, consume and avoid causing much trouble.

>should
but we won't

The best thing Marx did was take Hegel's method but reject Hegel.

FRIENDLY REMINDER THAT ALL POSTING ITT WHO HAVEN'T READ BEYOND THE MANIFESTO ARE CHARLATANS

t. Katie Hopkins

> capitalism is a runaway system that leads to massive waste
Define waste.
> unprecedented concentrations of power
I can think of many precedents to much larger extremes than both the corporatist system we have today and certainly eclipsing anything possible under a free market.
> abstract accumulation of capital is prioritised over everything else
Value is subjective, you don't know what people prioritise you don't know what they value, you are a child that can't even understand the basic motivations of your fellow man, get the fuck out.

hate to shill, but if you want to find out, come read with us.

>Value is subjective, you don't know what people prioritise you don't know what they value, you are a child that can't even understand the basic motivations of your fellow man
you really need to get into the nitty gritty of human psychology to know that shelter, food, water and clothing are the most basic priorities

and what about advertising? preferences don't exist in a vacuum, on the contrary, the powers that be spend billions shaping those preferences through their tightening monopoly on communication.

Karl Marx was brilliant and much of his analysis is applicable today.

However, it's probably much more important to discuss the ways Marxist theoretical innovations influenced history, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and the ways we view social and economic organization.

Persuasion isn't immoral and doesn't take away moral agency/free will just like spanking your kids doesn't necessitate the adoption of a view of then spanking or not spanking your own kids, it's an influence but still a choice.

We persuade people everyday, is it immoral for women to put on makeup to change our preferences? Or guys to seduce girls? Or parents to manipulate children? Or children persuasing parents? Or workers persuading clients or their boss? All of society, social interaction and human life involves persuasion, I don't see how it's immoral unless in the way it's used but not generally.

Which is fair enough, reminds me of Maslows hierarchy of needs, but for someone to say "abstract accumulation of capital prioritized over everything else" merely because money represents so many things we find important, like labour, resources, time, basic needs, our wants etc ignores all the complexities of human action within the economic system, Mises spent decades looking into it and people are too quick to assume shallow observations are true.

what about persuading people to overthrow capitalism? and what about the assymetry between the lonely consumer and the crushing weight of mass culture?

>what about persuading people to overthrow capitalism?
Well, you're invited to go ahead and try.
>and what about the assymetry between the lonely consumer and the crushing weight of mass culture?
There are many ways around this - gathering around communities of interest (ie Veeky Forums), reading publications and blogs to reflect your opinions - if anything, I'd say that mass culture as traditionally understood is unbundling into communities focused on some trivial interest or other.

>but for someone to say "abstract accumulation of capital prioritized over everything else" merely because money represents so many things we find important, like labour, resources, time, basic needs, our wants etc ignores all the complexities of human action within the economic system
listen I sincerely don't give a solitary shit about all those complexities
I see that we're getting closer and closer to a possible extinction event because the system we're in doesn't reward long-term thinking, or at least doesn't reward it appropriately
economics should serve humanity, not the other way around

> what about persuading people to overthrow capitalism?
Totally understandable, if you persuade enough people you're essentially changing the culture which is the same thing I want. I want to live in a society that the underlying culture values freedom and voluntaryism.

>economics should serve humanity
It doesn't? The systems that preceded capitalism weren't fair at all, they tended to be far more brutal. What's this possible extinction event you're talking about?

> economics should serve humanity, not the other way around
It does. Economics in the form of merely studying how humans act when interacting economically does serve us, it serves to explain to use the incentives and ideas behind what people do and how trying to meddle and manipulate this process of millions of individuals interacting has very bad consequences, like for example the short term incentives of politicians, the incentive of taking from others for your own benefit through the state due to legalizing and justifying coersion and plunder.

Those complexities are the most important thing, because they show us how little we actually know about the world and how our egotistical naive meddling is destructive.

Fear of extinction has been the case throughout most of human history, I'm not saying it's not a possibility but that possibility doesn't mean I have to adopt a pessimistic world view.

Capitalism in my opinion has served humanity, that is to say that people interacting voluntarily for mutual benefit has created the greatest benefits humans have ever experienced both materially and other. For the first time in human history we found that social interactions didn't have to be win/lose, we could trade instead of plunder, we could cooperate instead of fight.

Spontaneous order as they as say, muh n'visible hand brought out the best in humanity. The most beautiful sights, the best artists, the most profound thinkers, the most comforts, the most opportunities to get what we want/need and pursue higher goals.

I don't think something like this should be misrepresented by shallow insults like "accumulation of capital prioritized over everything else" without an ounce of understanding. The act of oversimplification is way too fucking common right now.

Not that, that's what you were doing.

Why do so many people become hysterical when workers want to benefit from the fruits of their labour?