Help me, Veeky Forums

Help me, Veeky Forums
How do I deconstruct idiots who insist Karl Marx was a smart man with good ideas? I just don't know how to isolate the bad theories and concepts and destroy them. I know they appeal to the outrage, insecurity and snobbery of armchair authoritarians, but being able to destroy their beliefs and theories and ideas that these things can work is akin to destroying Flat Earth Creationism.

I can't just fling books at them and expect them to read them. It needs to be knowledge prepared that I can use in the heat of the moment, to break their ideas with examples, both historical and hypothetical.

Help me wake up some commies, Veeky Forums. Help me give them alternative political and economic philosophies to get them off the communist teat.

Other urls found in this thread:

socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.ca/2017/01/debunking-marxism-101-updated.html
youtube.com/watch?v=3IsqZbhWisc
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

>soviet union
>communist china

>"That wasn't real communism, because Lenin input capitalist ideas in a STATE. Communism has no state and has no money!"
>"Maoist China isn't full communism either! It's a capitalist state!"

Communists and socialists are the biggest god damned babies, I swear.

Why are you so mad about socialists?

It's not all that bad

Das Kapital is actually a good book imo.
It's more descriptive and is more value-free than you'd think.

dunno why you're so butthurt though.

Centrally planned economies all go to shit in the long-run, friend. For instance, look at Venezuela. There are countless examples of this happening throughout recent history. I'm not sure why you're so concerned about what some dumb faggot Marxists thinks, for they are obviously ignorant to practical economic theory. Tell them to fuck off; move on to better things.

>be marx
>make extremely obvious observations about people
>get called a genius

Most people who talk about Marx, on BOTH sides, haven't even read Marx.

>That wasn't real communism

The definition of communist is literally impossible to achieve by design, and is used as a false promise by those who seek power for themselves. Communism is nothing more than a power grab ideology with a mask of equality

How have you not seen this yet?

Oh and after you tell him this, you tell him that every single time a government has been tried IN THE NAME OF communism, it has ended in disaster. Every single time. Which leads me back to my first point. That it's impossible to achieve by design and is nothing more than an autistic power grab which leads to millions of deaths.

well Marx social theories are almost impossible to refute, because anyone who is in charge is the hegemony and any level of agreement you have with the prevailing ideas is because you are brainwashed and want to be a part of the upper class

economics I don't know much about

Have you? It's interesting cause that'd kinda prove your own point

The easy way to attack Marx is to undermine his labor theory of value

Sort of takes the legs out of Marxism

Yeah, that's true.
Most modern 'marxists' don't rely on LTV anymore, though. It's seen as a piece of the puzzle :P

>yfw white collar labor is still labor
>yfw the value of products produced by automation, as well as software, obtain their value from the engineering labor that went into them
>yfw the labor theory of value is still accurate

labour theory of value
kek

it's the most retarded thing ever claimed on human history

scientology is far more legit

Not an argument

Yugoslavs would dissagree, their country went to shit after Tito died.

I'd like to help you but the thing is that Marx actually was right with most of "Das Kapital".
You should probably go on and read it instead of wanting to refute it without even knowing the content or arguments.

As pro captialist as I am if you're interested in knowing what Soviet Russia and communist China was, they were Marx's communist. Soviet Russia and China was a one party communist system where power was concentrated in the Politburo and money still existed. Marx wanted a democratic, moneyless society with free speech where the first priority of the state was the needs of the people, something both neglected. If you want something close to Marx's communist idea try Cuba or Venezuela.

im from ex-yu, and i agree that theres alot of fucki ng people who think yugoslavia was this great state, and the economy was great and so was the standard of living. Just ask them by which economic measure they think yugoslavia was great and after they say something google it and win the argument(all economic indicators in yugoslavia sucked vs it's peers)

According, to some book that i read, Marx tended to propose some good questions about capitalism, however the answer that he proposed were less than satisfactory. For example, he asked how do we measure useful labor and not useful labor.Yet he forgot that labor cannot be just given value on what we think is worth but what the market is willing to allocate for such labor.

They were actually not Marxist states, but more lenninist.

buy the dip, you dip

Don't be afraid to leave your filter bubble. Read contemporary communists and visit some of the socialist subreddits. Poke around with some questions to see what points they are soft on. Also realize that there are (at least a few) communists who are smarter than you so your beliefs don't derive from your intelligence. Then you'll be very convincing to them.

The wanker never worked a day in his life.
Contrary to popular belief, ad-homonims are a valid way to discredit someone. A (((NEET))) has just no place in telling anyone how to run society.

socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.ca/2017/01/debunking-marxism-101-updated.html

Marx suffers from all the same idiotic methodological issues that Austrianism does, it's all just pure theory.
Empiricism is the way to go. What you want to understand is just how real institutions really function in the real world today and in the past not in theory but in reality.

Venezuela doesn't centrally plan their economy, it's a (heavily regulated) market economy, it's probably less centrally controlled then the Scandinavian economies. Even in the Soviet Union where central planning was taken the farthest historically it was never so much a system for actually allocating given resources as a system for just mobilising resources. i.e. think of Russia in the 1990s when the end of planning led to unutilised reserves of production capacity and labour and allowed investment resources to flee the country.

The labor theory of value actually comes from Adam Smith you dummy.

If he had worked, he wouldn't have had time to spend all day studying in the British Library.

And of course Engels himself was a capitalist. That doesn't discredit them, but it will make a lot of "marxists" uncomfortable. Marx and Engels were nothing but bourgeois intellectual, but that didn't stop them. Lenin was a bourgeois intellectual as well.

I have actually studied Marxism rigorously over the course of about 7 years now. Mostly focusing on Marx and Lenin. It's actually an extremely profound way of thinking once you get the hang of it and I appreciate it a great deal.

Of course most so-called marxists, socialists and communists are complete morons, but that's beside the fact.

If you read carefully, you'll discover that Marxism isn't anti-capitalist at all. Nor is socialism anti-capitalist. If anything, it's pro-capitalism in a certain way.

You do realize that 'what the market is willing to allocate for such labor' is just the aggregate of what individuals think that labor is worth, right? And that's only on a macro level, in microeconomics that don't deal with broad markets value is literally determined by what someone thinks something (like labor) is worth.

I swear, you mongerals will argue about anything without having even a cursory understanding of what you're discussing.

If you guys this Russia was strictly socialist and American is strictly capitalist then you're retarded. Russia was socialist with a bit of capitalism, and failed because of corruption. America is capitalist with a hint of socialism (the programs which, when polled, Americans are overwhelmingly in favor for) and IS CURRENTLY failing because of corruption.

>And of course Engels himself was a capitalist. That doesn't discredit them, but it will make a lot of "marxists" uncomfortable.
No,because it's a known fact that he worked in a British firm. He was in a capitalist society, how else was he going to survive? Working in a firm does not magically turn you into a capitalist. In fact, he hated it but it also gave him data about how it worked and how it's workers were treated in such system.
>I have actually studied Marxism rigorously over the course of about 7 years now.

>If you read carefully, you'll discover that Marxism isn't anti-capitalist at all. Nor is socialism anti-capitalist. If anything, it's pro-capitalism in a certain way.

You are either lying about studying for 7 years or completely misinterpreted it.

Marxism IS anti capitalist. There is absolutely no way you can consider it pro capitalism. Perhaps you are confusing the part were initially a capitalist society is needed to afterwards make a revolution and take power, which will require a state which eventually will decrease its influence and hegemony reaching a socialist society, which doesn't require a state so it will also disappear slowly through time.

Or maybe you got confused in the part were Lenin tweaked it to apply it on Russia, but that's ignoring that it couldn't be applied directly because a capitalist society is industrialized and Russia was agrarian.

Either way, you really need to explain why you think Marx was pro capitalism, because it is factually incorrect, not to say blatantly ignorant

karl marx looks like the guy who played pablo escobar in narcos

Dude, if you go around anywhere and ask people if they want "free" shit they're almost invariably going to say they do.

Most people are in favor of socialist policies because they immediatley see the benefits of such policies while they almost never stop to consider the costs the costs. This is especially true when you're simply presenting a hypothetical situation. when you posit them as just hypothetical things. However, if you actually try to enact these policies then people will be forced to consider the costs involved and you'll find that far fewer people are actually in favor of these sorts of policies.

It's like asking people if they want this car free of charge and that there are no strings attached other than the caveat that they aren't allowed to sell it.

youtube.com/watch?v=3IsqZbhWisc

The vast majority of people would say something along the lines of, "Hell yea, that sounds awesome!" Then you actually try to give them the car and they realize they suddenly have to pay for the insurance, storage, and maintenance of the vehicle and they quickly realize that it's simply something they don't want to sustain. Sure the car is nice, but it's not really giving them anything they need and it's a big drain on them otherwise. For some people the car is great and totally worth it, but for all the other people it's more or less going to be a big fancy money pit.

tl;dr
Most surveys and polls are fucking stupid because people don't ask the right questions to get answers that mean anything and even when people do ask the right questions most people are too stupid to give an intelligent response.

t. some faggot who works in market research that silently stares at the faggots who write all the polls and surveys while they bitch and moan about people giving me the wrong answers while refusing to consider anyone else's input on the matter

I was referring to Americans polled about socialist policies that have already been enacted, such at the ACA and Social Security, which people overwhelmingly like.

>It's not all that bad

>No private property
>no ability to keep what you earn
>No ability to advance among your peers
>Have to be told what you need

The only argument I ever hear in favor socialism is for the "free" shit and "equality"

>Empiricism is the way to go.
Empirically, freedom works, democracy leads to big brother is watching and central banks lead to total collapse of the currency, increasing economic inequality in the process.

Here are some simple pictures:
comes in a series.

2

...

...

...

...

Last one.
Former /pol/ack, you're welcome.

If you don't already know the answers you clearly haven't watched enough molymeme or read any ayn rand

Leaving the obvious and well known arguments aside,
tell them that even Marx himself admitted that capitalism
has an inherent self-healing potential.
Yes, it produces crises, but what follows is not the
revolution but a relaunch. May look up Kondratjew
on this.
Even the poorest guy in a market economy is better
off nowadays than 150 years ago. Not saying that the
status quo is perfect but communism is not the answer.

i think hes thinking that everyone brings home money, homeless people are nonexistant, and everyone receives health care. the main people that oppose this imo are wealthy people because its not "fair" to them.

welcome to economics

The Nazis were right about the Bankers though. The Federal Reserve is pretty much Hydra

RRRRrrrrrreee. can't cope

Lenin didn't tweak anything. And Russia wasn't an "agrarian" society, despite the fact that many areas were heavily still agrarian. The revolution was made in St. Petersburg and Moscow and other industrial centers in the East, where some of Europe's largest factories were located. The capital investment from Western Europe in Russia was massive.

The point about Marxism being pro capitalist is obscure and I'm not willing to get into it here on this board, but trust me that I have been extensively educated on the subject. Neither Marx nor Lenin ever considered themselves "anti-capitalist" like current socialists and anarchists do. For Marx and Lenin, socialism is the immanent potentiality of capitalism, and only by universalizing and fulling capitalism, can socialism become possible. And of course socialism is not a positive program or alternative, its the fulfillment and negation of present conditions. Lenin himself rights about the revolution's mission of fulfilling the ideal of bourgeois right, which would in factopem up the possibility of it's transcendence.

Have you read Lenin's four major texts?

It's not like the concept of communal industries is inherently a hotbed of fuckery. The US would be a lot better if telecoms and pharmaceuticals weren't controlled by profit driven douchebags.

Threadly reminder that the materials for your cellphone are worth about $5.

Its value comes from the manual and engineering LABOR that went into producing it.

>Its value comes from the manual and engineering LABOR that went into producing it.

Fucking retard.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value