I want to speak against communism, so I should probably read Marx

I seriously disagree with that image. Have you ever seen the tombs of Pharaohs and Egyptian noblemen?

Having a fancier place to stuff your corpse into doesn't change the fact that you're dead.

Realize that Marx didn't take into account human nature in his ideal utopia

And that he himself was a rich burgeouise who was born into a rich family and didn't really have to work at all

When your tomb is uncovered it YOUR body that is remembered as that of a king. If you are to die why not leave a lasting impression?

>human nature
When will this meme end?

>And that he himself was a rich burgeouise who was born into a rich family and didn't really have to work at all

He was a poor journalist most of his life who had to rely on Engels patronage.

bingo, he was a welfare case

and instead of calling it a "meme" how about u form a response you ad hominen liberal shite?

oh my god i cannot believe you literally just said that you uneducated fascist shite, every person is literally equal no matter if theyre gay, muslim, jewish, a negro, everyone is literally the same and deserves the same amount of money for their work, there should be any social classes because everyone is literally equal and genetics is racist and dindus and honkeys have no difference in their dna because theyre literally equal, go take some womens studies courses or something...

well everyone is equal except for the evil honkeys, theyre patriarchical and racist and homophobic and transphobic and they made their life off the back of their slave negroes 50 years ago in jim crow, i literally hate white people so much, im a communist btw, i wouldnt mind joining isis so i could shoot some honkeys and destroy evil white capitalist america jahu bless and allahu ackbar

...

Lurk for two years before posting

...

...

what is this from?

just use common sense.it isnt that hard to refute communism, specially after so many failed attempts

Veeky Forums and it's Diogenes.

Read Alexander Solzhenitsyn

>A communist reads Marx, but an Anti-Communist actually understands Marx haha
Yeah, whatever, what is communism about?
>Your house is my house and the unemployed earn as much as those who work
everytiem

>inb4 real communism hasn't been tried yet

Also his daughters died because he didn't get enough money to feet a couple of them.

Fuck that guy on a personal level.

Ideologically, everything except the LTV (which is the support for a lot of his theoretical conclusions) is alright.

The LTV is arse.

Fucking hell I loved the cynics.

Up there in my list of most badass ascetics.

populist doesn't even mean anything

Americans can't talk about communism, bc they've historically been misinformed and brainwashed.

Calling Brexit communist is not the same thing as calling marx a populist
Brexit was a movement catalysed by a kind of revolutionary spirit, but the referendum in reality wasn't supposed to be anything more than smoke and mirrors to obscure/settle the power divisions in the tory cabinet

But now its happened and the MPs are all too sheepish to take control and too scared of others fucking it up to concede defeat

What's with communists and personality cults? Reading the original texts, you'd never think this would result in this, yet all communists I see do this to some degree.
And I'm asking this from a neutral point of view.

Having made up your mind before reading it is not a good first step toward understanding it.

I'm guessing a strong figure is needed in order to combat the insidious capitalism

Blame Stalin.

don't bother, no other critics of communism ever had.

Also its a serious risk if you did as you'd probably end up becoming a communist if you learnt what it actually was.

Because it usually takes one person to spearhead the "cultural revolution" necessary to inject a communist economy into whatever was there before.

It's far more specific than that and a marxist revolution would not be a communist revolution. So Brexit isn't marxist and even if it were, it would not be communist. But beyond that a really great, insightful contribution.

The idea that /pol/ mentality is just insecure young, white men having difficulty adjusting to society in which they feel lost and insignficant and lashing out due to this is best exmplified by this post and its positive responses. Look at how many buzzwords and memes he managed to fit in to a response to something that could only be seen as related if you depserately wanted it to. Its clear that he had a bad day and thought searching for an excuse to go on a racist, sexist tirade would calm his nerves. Fascinating.

This desperate need to constantly re-affirm dominance over others by questioning equality is such an obvious sign of deep insecurity. He feels as though he NEEDS to be better than others but fears that he isn't.

But it hasn't, if you understand communism and history this would be clear to you. If you had asked Stalin if the USSR was 'real communism' he would have told you that it wasn't, that it was socialism. And whether or not it could even be considered socialism has been heavliy disputed. But I'm sure you know better.

pretty much Stalin's fault :c

Marx obviously had a theory of "human nature" dingus
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_human_nature

>Exchange, both of human activity within production itself and of human product against one another, is equivalent to species-activity and species-spirit, the real, conscious and true mode of existence of which is social activity and social enjoyment. Since human nature is the true community of men, by manifesting their nature men create, produce, the human community, the social entity, which is no abstract universal power opposed to the single individual, but is the essential nature of each individual, his own activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth. Hence this true community does not come into being through reflection, it appears owing to the need and egoism of individuals, i.e., it is produced directly by their life activity itself. It does not depend on man whether this community exists or not; but as long as man does not recognise himself as man, and therefore has not organised the world in a human way, this community appears in the form of estrangement, because its subject, man, is a being estranged from himself. Men, not as an abstraction, but as real, living, particular individuals, are this entity. Hence, as they are, so is this entity itself. To say that man is estranged from himself, therefore, is the same thing as saying that the society of this estranged man is a caricature of his real community, of his true species-life, that his activity therefore appears to him as a torment, his own creation as an alien power, his wealth as poverty, the essential bond linking him with other men as an unessential bond, and separation from his fellow men, on the other hand, as his true mode of existence, his life as a sacrifice of his life, the realisation of his nature as making his life unreal, his production as the production of his nullity, his power over an object as the power of the object over him, and he himself, the lord of his creation, as the servant of this creation.

>The LTV is arse.
Why? Even if you accept marginal utility and bourgeois economics to explain the variations in commodity prices in the very short run still in the long run production obviously will increase or decrease supply to meet the level of demand for that commodity. Over time price will fluctuate around the price of production. Production costs in a free market are ultimately resolvable into the average amount of socially necessary labour-time.

Careful- if you read Marx you might end up *agreeing* with him- and we can't have people changing their minds can we?

Just stick to /pol/ and you'll be fine- no new information, no chance of being wrong.

by the way i have a question. what is the LTV answer to cases like "singed copy of Das Kapital sells for $3000000"?

i mean i know it's an anomalous case of supply and demand but like, since "total values = total prices", for a commodity to get price($) way above it's value(labour), others would have to devaluate: what commodities devalue so something rises way way up it's value?

VALUE IS NOT PRICE YOU IDIOT.

This abridgement of Capital is probably the best place to start. It is short enough to be approachable but also has all of Marx's key ideas about capitalist economics. It's a tough read, but trod through it and evaluate it fairly.

Next you should read the Communist Manifesto, which will probably take you an hour.

Then read the Road to Serfdom by FA Hayek. Hayek tears into many fallacies that Marx's theories are based on, the historical consequences of Marxism, the philosophical issues with collectivist politics, etc. Awesome book.

??????

my post is exactly about when price rises above value

(illustative video: youtube.com/watch?v=UqOtQM8PCvA)

>"Value, Price and Profit" was a speech given to the First International Working Men's Association in June in 1865 so it should be pretty easy to grasp
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/

This.

>VALUE IS NOT PRICE YOU IDIOT.
Retard, Marx first came up with value as labor when explaining what two things, equal in so far as they are exchange values, have in common.

Marx's way had to do with proportion of capital to industrial capital and the total surplus being divided among capitalists according to that.

Google the transformation problem.

Btw, heads up, the only people that take the LTV seriously now are more or less armchair economists and you can be damn sure they aren't attending any good colleges/working in them.

Most modern Marxists have either avoided, reformed or rejected the LTV.

>liberal
Socialists aren't liberals.

>Most modern Marxists have either avoided, reformed or rejected the LTV.

Without LTV we still have the concept of "surplus value"?

brexit was about the british rejecting the european bourgeoisie in favor of their own local bourgeoisie

absolutely nothing marxist about that

and they still have a queen. top kek

Communists don't have a cult of personality problem. We get to admire our leaders, revolutionary heroes, and great philosophers like everyone else. We don't worship anyone or make up stories about them like capitalists do with Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt, etc.

finally i'm going somewhere...

the thing with this tansformation problem is that even though the ratios of dead and living labour are different among different commodities, they all tend to average in the end of the day(?)

isn't this the start of his crisis theory? commodities have different ratios of labour(S) and capital(c) imputs, for a momentanueous advantage in competition to lower the socially required labour time, capitalists an encouraged to invest in (c) rather than (S), thus the rate of profit (S/(c+V)) decreases, right?

anyway, could you please tell these reforms to the LTV by modern marxists? any books or something?

Communist revolutions took place in countries where the vast majority of the population consisted of illiterate peasants who could only be mobilized through a cult of personality.

Stalin did nothing wrong. The mentality of early 20th century Russians was very centered on finding a leader to admire. They were too accustomed to honoring the Czar, even after the Czar was gone. The culture was still heavily semi-feudal and the peasantry simply wasn't as intellectually prepared for the kind of heavy theoretical material of Lenin and Stalin. Stalin condemned much of this so-called cult of personality. He was a great leader, on par with Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and JFK, for the US. The over-enthusiasm of his supporters is largely because they were poor early 20th century Russians that were used to authoritarianism and dogmatism.

>I want to speak against communism
>never read Marx
>don't even know what communism is
I prefer Lenin

It's not a monarchy, the Royals don't do anything except provide faces to put on postage stamps and coins

you're fucked, it will take you a lifetime, just to prove him wrong. just read the spark notes on communism.

it'll take a few years just to get through hegel and marx, and then any critique you think up will be addressed by the neo-marxists, then every critique you think of that will be addressed by the postmarxists.

by then you'll have read about 500 books.

why not just say 'im not an expert on communism' and go have some fun with your comrades in the park?

they are symbols, symbos of how big cucks are the brits.

I wish the word cuck would be banned, it's so overused and fucking annoying as shit

The LTV wouldn't be concerned with such anomalies because supply and demand isn't as important in the long run as costs of production when analysing capitalist production as a totality. This is why microeconomics can't provide a proper foundations for understanding capitalism for obvious reasons.

Exchange doesn't create new value it can only changes the distribution of value. Devaluation during a crisis rearranges the entire capital structure

>Thus, in a crisis – a general depreciation of prices – there occurs up to a certain moment a general devaluation or destruction of capital. The devaluation, like the depreciation, can be absolute and not merely relative, because value expresses not merely a relation between one commodity and another, as does price, but rather the relation between the price of the commodity and the labour objectified in it, or between one amount of objectified labour of the same quality and another. If these amounts are not equal, then devaluation takes place, which is not outweighed by appreciation on the other side, for the other side expresses a fixed amount of objectified labour which remains unchanged by exchange. In general crises, this devaluation extends even to living labour capacity itself. In consequence of what has been indicated above, the destruction of value and capital which takes place in a crisis coincides with – or means the same thing as – a general growth of the productive forces, which, however, takes place not by means of a real increase of the productive force of labour (the extent to which this happens in consequence of crises is beside the point here), but by means of a decrease of the existing value of raw materials, machines, labour capacity. For example. The cotton manufacturer loses capital on his products (e.g. twist), but he buys the same value of cotton, labour etc. at a lower price. It is the same for him as if the real value of labour, of cotton etc., had decreased, i.e. as if they had been produced more cheaply owing to an increase in the productive force of labour. In the same way, on the other hand, a sudden general increase in the forces of production would relatively devalue all the present values which labour objectifies at the lower stage of the productive forces, and hence would destroy present capital as well as present labouring capacity. The other side of the crisis resolves itself into a real decrease in production, in living labour – in order to restore the correct relation between necessary and surplus labour, on which, in the last analysis, everything rests.
From the Grundrisse

Except you do.
North Koreans attribute miraculous powers to the Kims.

inb4 the "n-n-not really communism" retort.

retard and faggot are fine though

You are correct about the communist aspect however the USSR was a socialist economy.

The two-fold character of labour (it's utility to produce value and its market cost) causes the general contradiction of capitalism but a crisis of overproduction brings out the contradiction between loan-capital (money existing outside the production process) and industrial capital (directly involved in the production process). Capital requires circulation without actual circulation time, factious capital is necessary to fill the gap but speculation always enhance crisis situations by allowing the fictitious over-evaluation of capital, which then cannot satisfy the profit claims which are bound up with it. Book depreciation eventually becomes greater than reported profits. The depreciation costs turns debt-capital into demand for money which result in an inflate in costs to cover the losses from all the fixed-capital which was financed via debt.

Crises and devaluation of fixed-capital enforced by competition however actually delays the implosion of capitalism because it causes a rise in the rate of profit for new firms when old firms have to "write off" their past investments. This deprecation actually rises the rate of profit! Unrecognized deprecation costs however accumulate as potential illiquidity. General devaluations however haven't occurred since before WWI and state monopoly capital will bail out banks and foreclose on people to maintain the value of dead labour at the expense of living labour to save the fictitious paper economy from collapsing.

youtube.com/watch?v=Tmi8cJG0BJo

>Stalin did nothing wrong

What is holodomor?
What is Gulag?
What is the Great Purge?
What is Moscow Trials?
Killing the Red Army?
What is Dekulakization?
What is Great Famine?
Killing Orthodox Christians?

>bases theory upon fallacy
>"don't say my theory is based on a fallacy!"

Living on the bottom of the sea using your bioluminescense to attract prey is not human nature. Things that humans do all the time such as sharing and volunteering are absolutely in human nature.

>What is holodomor?
famine caused by butthurt kulaks (landowners) who burnt crops in response to socialist collectivization policies, nothing to do with Stalin
>what is Great Famine
synonym for Holodomor
>what is Dekulakization
Solution for Holodomor
>What is Gulag
Prison system

>What is the gulag?

Some kind of siberian guantanamo?

Yeah no real communism has been tried because there was no dictatorship of the proliteriate because Marx's predictions were wrong because he did not account for structural growth.

>it has never been tried

I don't think you people know what "trying" is.

The Great Famine and Holodomor were two different things.

The Great Famine was the result of a shitty and poorly thought out crop plan.

Holodomor on the other hand was an act designed to take out a Ukrainian region that loudly expressed anti socialist ideals and was largely Nationalistic.

No. They were actually terrible. More like alcatraz with forced labor, if you escaped you'd be in another prison called fucking Siberia so good luck lol

>I want to speak against Communism
>But I don't know what it is
How about you read Marx to read Marx, rather than setting yourself up to debate him?

>Read Marx
>Realize that his critic of capitalism is accurate
>However, his solutions are terrible

That's how you dit.

Is this where you lurch into Third-Wayism?

inb4 op reads marx and becomes a communist himself

then why do you care about debating communism, since the few ones who support it haven't read marx

You want to critique something and you've never even read it's foundational work?

If you have to ask such a question you definitely shouldn't be setting out to critique at this point. Read Marx, then decide if you can even see something worth critiquing.

"I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave."

if marx was so right how come he and his sugar daddy couldn't even critique stirner?

>We get to admire our leaders, revolutionary heroes, and great philosophers
Admire them for what, murdering everyone who doesn't like them? Marx couldn't even run a family, and his philosophy has lead to some of the shittiest living conditions known to man, every time. Give up on this tired old meme.

Because Stirner is unassailable in the same way teen nihilism is.

You don't have to agree with everything Marx wrote.

Except that he builds his conclusion around the only spook he failed to bust.

>ctrl + f: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
>0 results
baka!

All revolutions in history are followed by some sort of personality cult, it's just that communist revolutions bring the idea of a continuous struggle after the revolution therefore the cult must continue everyday as if the revolution has happened yesterday.

See how latinos have their revolutionaries of independence in such high esteem, of course it does not equate with the worship that takes place in North Korea but that's because the struggle of Latin American independentists is over, the Juche struggle isn't.

>soviet apologetics
>lazy, inaccurate post
>implying a 5 year old would be satisfied with describing the Gulags as "a prison system"
>managed to sanitize the Holodomor
>lost steam and couldn't justify each historical event the post he was quoting brought up

W H Y
A R E
C O M M U N I S T S
F U C K I N G
R E T A R D E D?

Are you perchance a member of the bourgeoisie?

yeah , and guantanamo is a comfy resort in the caribean.
what solutions?

90% of his writings are on capitalism, there are no 'solutions'

(the manifesto isn't meant to be taken seriously)

...

I wouldn't bother, simply point to any attempt to implement a 'communist' system, whether it's cambodia, china(before xiaoping), soviet union, cuba, venezuela, take your pick

if you;re interested in economics then just read a textbook and maybe critiques of marx's ltv if you really have to have a rebuttal against him (sraffi, joan robinson)

if you care about sociology then marx may actually have some insight here, on alienation, class interests

Yes, true.

I really wish Veeky Forums has an algorithm where any user who used /pol/ more than 50% of the time would just get locked into the board for a month or something.
This could also backfire, but at least it would be contained.

Sadly no one who actually criticizes Marx or Marxism will read this or even understand what is meant, because that takes dedicated concentration, time, and a real desire to understand complex things.
Marx was right, but what happens here is the /pol/tards come in and give the appearance that the young are either ignorant or anti-marxists, when in actual fact statistics show a growing interest in him and his ideas. But this place gives one a very unbalanced view of how our generation thinks.

That's how /pol/tards get members, misinformation.

How am I wrong, all I said was it has been disputed, it has been disputed.

get real you tankie cunt, morons like you give socialism a bad name.

>I want to speak against communism
>2016

What a brave position