Can we get a Marxist history thread?

Was the person who made that meme actually serious?

>Marxists conceive the French Revolution as a dialectical turning point in which the bourgeoisie supplanted the proletariat as the ruling class of France.
The proletariat?

>Is there any fucking solid principles behind history?

No, which is why Marx was wasting his time trying to find them. He went further than that, however, by equating the phenomenon of "social war", known since ancient times, as being THE engine of "history", when in fact it is merely A strand within "politics".

Marx did not really work on social history or history of labour. That was more of an Engels thing.

Marx's pure unadulterated thought lies in Kapital, and there he takes the standard Adam Smith/Ricardo view of labor as the driving force of social change.

Class struggle is a subset of this, but its not really elaborate what forms it takes apart from the standard historical evolution ancient slave economy->feudalism->capitalism.

It's that people are primarily influenced by wealth rather than culture.
At least he got that right.

>It's that people are primarily influenced by wealth rather than culture

lol

It's a meme. Only retards make serious memes.

>the standard Adam Smith/Ricardo view of labor as the driving force of social change.

Again, this is childishly simplistic. Marx's success is quite baffling to me, his ideas are so obviously ill conceived, his books are so long and boring, and as a man he seems to have been very stand-offish and reserved. Plus, he was a Jew, not exactly a big selling point back in the 19th century.

The meme is retarded. Saying that hard work creates wealth is not the same thing as the idea that the work itself is what adds value to something; the latter is obviously wrong.

We get it, you dont like Marx.

If you actually understood the Marx LTV, you would know it's not retarded, because your meme understanding is wrong and unfactual.

LTV is right and wealth is the result of hard work

it's just said wealth doesn't go to the ones doing the labor, so he will just press the first one

French Revolution Marx said was the bourgeoisie overthrowing their Feudalistic masters and becoming the new master, he kinda basis his philosophy on this event (he's kinda wrong though)

the meme falsely equates a statement that could be made by a non-marxist (i.e. that human efforts create things that have value), and the marxist view that the amount of labor itself is what makes something valuable, which is clearly wrong.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value

Try reading more.

Wealth is the result of oppression.

>people are primarily influenced by wealth rather than culture

Depends on the culture.

Wealth is the result of OTHER people's labor

it's still labor = wealth just not your wealth or labor

You think people are unfamiliar with that stupidity? You read more, faggot.

>Wealth is the result of OTHER people's labor

Also wrong.

...

yes it's wrong

which is why Marxist wants to make it right by having both the one who does the labor and the one who does wealth be the same person, unlike now where it different people

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value
>Some wiki article about surplus value

Literally not an argument. LTV asserts that the value of all commodities are measured by the av. number of labor hours necessary to produce it. This theory relies on economic inputs, which does not explain how most things are actually priced.

>Labor theory of value

I really don't fucking understand it.
How could prices ever be defined in such a simplistic manner?

Wrong as in factually incorrect, not as in morally wrong. The amount of labor that was used to produce something is independent of its value. Wealth is not derived from labor.

I'm not posting about whether you agree with LTV

just saying that Marxist that believe in LTV and that wealth is the result of hard work are not contradicting themselves (it's just their hard work results in wealth for someone else)

the proletariate, you retard?
yeah pre-French revolution the working class alienated from their labor by the CAPITALIST FRENCH LABOR AND CAPITAL OWNERS ruled France.

in Marx' Das Capital, the French Revolution gives birth to capitalism by supplanting the old royal family, aristocrats and the church ushering in an era of private ownership of land and labor.

Nope. Class struggle is just the vantage point by which Marxist historians analyze history. Compare this to traditional accounts of history which use the vantage point of upper-class affairs.

Marxism is a great method of analysis that completes orthodox accounts. Even a right-wing historian can admit that a class analysis is necessary to understand the colonization of the Americas, French revolution, and the development of capitalism.

In the same way you define how much hard work gives you how much riches.

I meant to say the aristocracy. It was late and I was slightly drunk. Forgive me.

I don't think that Marx equates price with value.

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/

This is an interesting and fairly short piece of Marx's dealing with this subject, among others.

The reason he doesn't is that you can't get a theory of prices from the LTV.
In other words, the LTV is completely useless aside from ideological purposes.

>the French Revolution gives birth to capitalism

Oxi!
It gave birth to generalised rule by the bourgeoisie, their rise to class dominance, but it didn't give birth to capitalism, in many ways the reverse is true.
The first capitalist state was probably the Dutch republic. After them, England.

Price doesn't equal value. Value is what something should cost, all other things equal.

Marx (and Ricardo and Adam Smith) believed that value in use was determined by labor. A fancy saddle was more expensive than a simple saddle because more labor hours are needed to produce it. Rubies are more valuable than common stones because more labor hours are necessary to find and cut them.

>Value is what something should cost

spoooooooooky

No, you are simply unable to conceive that value could mean something other than price.

The difference between value in use and value in exchange is a major part of how profit is created -- Essentially all goods are sold for more than they're worth.

I'm no economist, but I think Marx said that price - a commodity's exchange value dependent on supply and demand - is moderated by its value, i.e. cost of production, which is mainly the labour invested into the materials to create the commodity.

It makes more sense than the subjective theory of value, wherein worthless objects are always worth more than useful ones, regardless of who is buying, when and where, and where you require the price to calculate the value and vice versa.

I may be wrong, but the tone of your post suggests that you are just mouthing off stuff that you have heard is the 'proper' and 'sensible' response to the LTV being mentioned, that's pretty low, even for Veeky Forums.

Marginalism says there's nothing wrong with paying $100 for a cup of water because it has more utility than a diamond.

Ok, sorry, I misunderstood you.

But that's true. Human irrationality is why we pay so much for useless objects. If people weren't so uneducated, there would be no diamond industry.

>No, you are simply unable to conceive that value could mean something other than price

I'm quite able to do so, what I'm saying is that it's irrelevant. If you can't derive prices from it, it's meaningless to say "the ebil capitalist is stealing value" (which he is not btw) because there's nothing that actually correspond to it.

>but I think Marx said that price - a commodity's exchange value dependent on supply and demand - is moderated by its value

The problem is, that's not true. People have tried for more than a century to get a theory of price out of the LTV, it can't be done.

>It makes more sense than the subjective theory of value, wherein worthless objects are always worth more than useful ones

top fucking kek, you accuse people of mouthing off things and this is your idea of the subjective theory of value?

price and value are distinct, this is covered in the second book of capital. Furthermore you have to consider that the value is the sum of the total work hours put into the product, let's say it's a piece of bread. You do not only calculate the hours the baker put into baking the bread, you calculate the hours the truck driver spent providing his transport service as well as the hours the mill workers spent grinding the wheat into flour, and the farmers farming the wheat. Things that are more valuable are usually more difficult to extract and require a larger amount of workers/professionals spending their time working on it, and by extension the professionals working on it are usually fewer in number than manual laborers and their time is more 'valuable' as more jobs require and seek their skill, whereas the need for common manual labor is more easily fulfilled.

sorry for the massive post, but I hope I managed to explain it.

Except under LTV, water is worth the labor of obtaining it and securing it

nobody outside of /leftypol/ circlejerk sessions takes the LTV seriously anymore and they basically consider modern economics as equivalent to theocracy

you're basically arguing with the chirstfags of the economic world

>a basic understanding of Marxian analysis is important to becoming a serious historian.
>serious historian

If only to understand what a colossal fuck up Marxism and its equally flawed offshoots had on the 20th century, then sure

Marxist governments =/= Marxian analysis!

T u r c h i n

most historians may use elements of class analysis but they dont subscribe to marx's theories on history, which are generally seen as incomplete or short sighted

Can someone explain dialectical materialism to me? I'm having a hard time getting it.

>most historians may use elements of class analysis but they dont subscribe to marx's theories on history, which are generally seen as incomplete or short sighted
>>>
> Anonymous 01/13/17(Fri)09:16:36 No.2216295 ▶
>Can someone explain dialectical materialism to me? I'm having a hard time getting it.

So Kant brought back the idea of the dialectic. His idea was that meaning is created by the binary opposition between two concepts. He was trying to show that pure reason is not comprehensive because meaning is so heavily influenced by the dialectic.

Hegel steps in and uses this dialectic to do sort of the opposite. We vaguely refer to it as the Hegelian dialectic. He creates a universal history where progress happens out of a process that starts with a thesis. This thesis is then confronted with its insufficiencies, almost its exact opposite and its called the antithesis. Finally after thesis and antithesis confront one another, you get synthesis which is a combination of the two that accounts for the lapses in both of them. This synthesis is the next level of progress. Ma boy Hegel used this to develop his idea of the universal spirit of freedom among other things. Essentially the whole world converges towards one universal goal that comes at the end of a bunch of thesis-antithesis-synthesis (thesis) cycles.

Step in Marx (probably the most famous materialist) and he takes this dialectic and says that "the spirit of freedom" doesn't drive progress it's the material world. Your socio-economic (class) conditions drive history. So for him history is that of class struggle. You have the original thesis (primitive communism) - anti-thesis (private property) - synthesis/thesis (slave society).

Dialectic materialism is materialism (class and socioeconomic conditions as the building block of society and meaning) applied to the hegelian dialectic, including the thesis-antithesis-synthesis mechanism and universal history.

Thats literally Adam Smith, Marx teaches an untrivial variation of that.

Good post, thanks.

...

Why is it that anti-Marxist "memes" are so cringeworthy that they derail threads?

I thought it was pretty funny.

Faggot.

*tips fedora*

Isn't fucking for six hours a good thing?

This is why Veeky Forums is great

Nahh, if you take six hours for normal sex you're just bad at it

Six labor hours of sex would provide twelve times the value-in-use of a normal instance of sex

>No, which is why Marx was wasting his time trying to find them.
Fuck you, postmodernist.

Because internet marxists can't into memes. Really, neither here, nor on Russian imageboards there are no left memes which can derail a discussion.

If someone has been trotting around in the desert for days and he has been slowly dying of thirst, then yes.