Why do people still cling to Marx?

Cas regardless of his ideas of Communism, his Marxist criticisms of Capitalism are spot on. His work is always an eye-opener., and unlike many philosophers, he fucking backed it up with empirical data.

Other STEMfag here.

There are mathematicized versions of Marxism that are equally as true and useless as those of other systems.

You should really recognize the power of axioms and object definitions if you've studied steMMMMMMM, or the other side of the coin which is the universality of quantitative reasoning.

Why read Marx when you can read INFINITE JEST?

If I go for a walk and find a diamond lying on the ground I didn't expend any labor at all but it's still worth a shit ton. There are rough diamonds lying around in some areas, like in Canada.

The price of a stock fluctuates according to subjective factors, not expended labor. The firm may not have very much employment at all.

Why does land have value? No labor goes into land.

Why are some pieces of art or antique valuable, even if the artist just wrote his name on a urinal or splattered paint on a canvas?

>STEMfag

You've made your choice. Get off this board already.

Stemfags enrich literature more than humanities cucks, these days. Moron.

hi jeremy1122

Diamonds value is held by monopolies on the sale of diamonds and cultural manipulation.

Arts value is an elaborate way to trade and hide money used by rich jewish families

>cue the parodies of why can't people just let go of:
>the greeks
>the existentialists
>christianity
>nationalist figures
Etc etc...

I thought everybody would know that when we talk about value we talk about it being framed by a market composed by consumers and organized entities dedicated to sistematically obtain (the easiest way of doing this is via straight exploitation/production, not ramdom encounters with diamonds) and sell what those consumers demand.
That being said, I'm fiercely anti marxist tho.

I posted this in a nationalist thread about a week ago, his critique of capitalism is very good if you ignore the alienated labor. I would say that most sjw idiots have read the communist manifest, at most. His early writings are pretty redpilled. He makes prostitue and irish potato famine jokes as well. The thing the academics and sjw idiots will gloss over, is that never, not once does he say that capitalism is unjust or that communism would be just (plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#5 (read the morality section)). Leftists and libtards love him because he justifies their oarasitic existence. They assume his criticism was on point, therefor his solution must also be good. In Critical notes on "The King of Prussia and Social Reform" he says
> pauperism has developed into a national institution which has inevitably become the onject of a highly ramified and extensive administrative system, a system however which no longer sets out to eleminate it, but which strives to instead discipline and perpetuate it.

If that doesnt describe modern day libs idk what does. They like the parts about wealth redistribution but ignore where he shits all over the government. If youre a kid who identifies as a marxist, you have not read marx. The professors convince kids to like him so the gravy train doesnt stop. If he were alive today he'd hate all these people.

Sorry about typos im on my ipad and my rat-looking dog keeps farting.

Only good thing about marx is that he is dead. fucking commie.

people cling to Marx because he has a intelligible explanation for our contemporary crisies

Reminder that intelliglible doesn't mean accurate, but only easy to digest.

An explanation of the problem is no great feat, Marx couldn't formulate a workable solution.

smart, invaluable post

>workable
read more Marx m8

Read something more than Marx m8

Type something you know about, ass

No you

here's your you, ass

Why can't marxists ever give coherent justifications to their ideas instead of invariably telling you to read one of the 4 of 5 authors they know?

I'm not a marxist, but you're obviously an ass, writing these shitty retorts.

You're an idiot

t. sociologist

wdtem

Summerfag go to bed. Your Marxist older bros are talking.

Marx gave the basis to everything that's wrong with humanities today.
Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, the entire School of Frankfurt, Zizek, all these hacks built their oeuvre over Marx's teachings and unleashed shit like deconstructivism and discourse theory on the world, shaping academia as nothing but a massive "politized" circlejerk.

With that said, it is important we study his works, if only to see they don't work in any way, be it directly and literally, or adapted to the times.

Dialectical materialism is an interesting tool to analyse human history, even if you don't agree with Marx prognosis about the future of capitalism, or if his advice is not really useful for today's problems.

Moreover, the guy is one of the main influences on something that is widely accepted today: economic and material conditions shape ideas. This is obvious today, but it wasn't back in his day.

not even, bro

>With that said, it is important we study his works, if only to see they don't work in any way, be it directly and literally, or adapted to the times
progressive detected

No way user, I'm really conservative and Marx is wrong about work and the evolution of capital, I swear

>Just Google it for countless sites
Jesus.

m.maybe user meant jut JSTOR it for countless articles?

t.this is Veeky Forums right?

It's funny because this is the opposite of whats true

Marxism is based on materialism. Your retarded liberal capitalism is based on idealism.

>Letting some rich guy extract all the value from your labor and giving you back a fraction of its true worth
>not cuck AF

It's a real right place / right time thing. A big part of it is simply a transfer of the appeal of Hegel's logic to academics into political and social structure, but with a leftist twist. The greater part of the social class that forms academia in the west was a class that originated out of the recovery from the great depression, which was a leftist recovery in at least image, if not reality. The idea of s

Because you're a STEMfag, I can forgive you for not being all that familiar with the basic classical political economy. But I really wish you and didn't talk about authors you clearly haven't read. If you had actually read Adam Smith or (not and), David Ricardo, you would understand why this is an inane response: because labor necessarily is not equivalently valuable by in time, by conditions which Smith spells out that naturally arise in part 1 of chapter 5 of The Wealth of Nation. But it is clear to all the political economists that because there is rarely any sort of equilibrium of supply and demand in labor markets (or any market), conditions, therefore, arise that have nothing to do with natural inequalities - which make perfect sense. That is why if you had only read the first page of Kapital you would know that it was as clear to Marx as anyone that "hurr everyone should be paid the same who works the same amount of time" is not what he is arguing: he argues that use value (something we all know as a factor in demand) does not consistently match with the exchange value.

I really wish people who talked about the labor theory of value actually read about it rather than say things that the classical economists and Marx all knew quite well.

Don't paint me as somebody defending Marx's analysis, or even the analysis of the followers and predecessors of Ricardo. That's not the point of any science - it's to develop and critique giants. But to not have to go through the arguments that were all addressed so early on in the science of economics, and worst of all in the really early chapters of their principal works, would be so nice. It's just embarrassing that a literature board discusses concepts in books that they don't read.

And here's where I'm really gonna trigger you: this didn't happen so much until /pol/ "redpilled" every single board with their reaction images and aggressive infographics. There was shitposting, but people read the works they discussed, or at least had elementary understandings of the work. In fiction threads, people ask questions about works they read. As soon as politics comes up the opposite happens and you have a great deal of far right extremists who bring up elementary arguments that everybody who reads is familiar with.

Fine I am a big dumb dumb. Enlighten me then, does Marx ever explain why land has value, or why value is subjective ie in art or stocks? Because to upper middle class people like me the labor theory of value seems intuitively wrong.

these are 101 critiques which show your complete ignorance.

the vlaue of a product is the average amount of time to make it. if everyone could pick up diamonds then they would be worthless. using a random. the diamond has value because you normally have to expend labour to mine it out of the ground, it is not something intrinsic the object itself, it is social relation.

price and value are different so the stock example isn't a problem. when stock prices become to divorced from the underlying value we get crashes.

land has value because you can accrue rent from it. and rent comes from using labour on the land

value is a about reproducible commodities, marx never claimed it was applicable to art not is it necessary. he was trying to explain the functioning of commodity production not the price of intangible things

>you normally have to expend labour to mine it out of the ground

You could spend roughly the same amount of labor mining other gems, but other gems are worth less. Copper mining is not that different from gold mining, yet gold is more expensive.

>price and value are different so the stock example isn't a problem. when stock prices become to divorced from the underlying value we get crashes.

So the TRUE value of the stock is zero, even though my portfolio is worth millions. Okay buddy.

>land has value because you can accrue rent from it. and rent comes from using labour on the land

Nobody labors in a house. They just live in it.

>value is a about reproducible commodities

Ok.

reading is fun, try it

As a business economic major this post gave me cancer.

>Just Google it

I should use this in my next bibliography for university

Marx did not differ very radically from anyone in assigning why land has value: it is a traded commodity. But do you think that value has nothing to do with labor? You can examine the transfer of land from feudal or colonial to capitalist ownership, which of course involves the labor, say, of the American revolution, the Louisianian purchase, the Mexican-American war, the enforcement of the Indian Removal Act, and many far far more labor than just that in the United States alone, and Marx does that kind of thing in Chapter 27 of capital in describing that European transfer. But simply look at the careers of upper middle class people like you and me. The realtors, bankers (and therefore a mysterious mix of the laboring borrowers), lawyers, accountants, insurance agencies, people who work for all of those, and theoretically law enforcement, are all involved in the trade and securing of land, and therefore their labor is a factor in the purchase thereof.

The point is that all commodities with a subjective value (which influences the actual prices of commodities) are originally created and exchanged first through labor and then the labor from which their value was extracted is exchanged through the money-commodity. This is not Marx: this is Smith.

The point Marx is making is that through markets, the real price paid by the laborer and the money/exchange price of labor is exchanged for become radically different in markets. His term for value assigned to labor is far more thorough than that of the classical economists: socially necessary abstract labor time.

If there were nothing like the stock market (and I don't mean independent, amateur investors - I mean a whole infrastructure of investment banks) then there would be no such subjective value to stock ownership. The fallacy is that wall street is "natural", a dangerously vague term.

I'm not reading 1000s of pages of crazy German ramblings. This is like the papists who tell you to read the entire Summa Theologica to find out why god is real. If you can't succinctly explain why I'm wrong then you're not much of a big smart thinker yourself.

Kill your're self

You are wrong because you expect the world to do the work for you. You are wrong because you don't want to read to understand. Your mind is made of memes.

Nobody is asking you to read Das Kapital: they are just asking you not to discuss what you don't understand. You really have no room to critique catholic theology if you haven't read Summa Theologica, but nobody is asking you to critique Catholic theology.

If you don't like idea and thinking and arguments, just don't read and don't spout bullshit about it on Veeky Forums. Nobody will complain. It would be far more fruitful to read the Wealth of Nations than Das Kapital if you want to understand the LTV, but I'm no asking you to do that either. Just don't go around refuting the concepts you don't have an elementary understanding of.

Okay daddy. I've learned my lesson about shitposting - at least for today.

I'll try to figure out these big concepts and then maybe you can quiz me on them.

the true value of stock is its value. prices reflect value in the future, or that's the idea anyway, they become instrument of speculation ie fictitious capital

its what that land could be used for otherwise. the rent that can accrue to the ownership of land if it it is used productively determines the rent on all other pieces of land whatever they are used for.

>If you had actually read Adam Smith or (not and), David Ricardo, you would understand why this is an inane response: because labor necessarily is not equivalently valuable by in time, by conditions which Smith spells out that naturally arise in part 1 of chapter 5 of The Wealth of Nation. But it is clear to all the political economists that because there is rarely any sort of equilibrium of supply and demand in labor markets (or any market), conditions, therefore, arise that have nothing to do with natural inequalities - which make perfect sense. That is why if you had only read the first page of Kapital you would know that it was as clear to Marx as anyone that "hurr everyone should be paid the same who works the same amount of time" is not what he is arguing: he argues that use value (something we all know as a factor in demand) does not consistently match with the exchange value.
Locke, who really is the big daddy when it comes to LTV, only argues that labour entitles you to the value of your work product. In fact only entitles you within reason, you cannot be said to own something if ownership is at the serious expense of others. That's really the essence of any LTV, labour confers entitlement because who else can be said to own any improvement in value?

>Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, the entire School of Frankfurt, Zizek, all these hacks built their oeuvre over Marx's teachings
They're mostly Nietzscheans if anything.

Critical theory is more about turning a idealist theory into a materialist one. And it has a lot to do with Freud's work, not only Marx.

Lmao you don't need to read a mountain of Catholic theology to refute it. It's a paradox that refutes itself. 70% of philosophers reject religion for a reason.

>this is the average memegoist

very appropriate captcha too

Every plan works until it's put into action. Data is meaningless if the concept can't be implemented.

You're just making blind assertions without reading the work of a real journalist. Don't be a Fox News sheepie. Marx cited data on poverty and class in Das Capital to back up his claims. You don't want to try to refute that because you're not as great a man as he is.

News is for people who don't go out into the world and form their own philosophy for themselves.

I was talking about how his ideals where corrupted by power seekers and his "glorious" revolution was deluded by those who took advantage of it. I said nothing of his works and data being incorrect.

yeah but more value has already been congealed in the more valuable steel, thus resulting in your labor transferring a greater magnitude of value into the driveshaft it produces.

>My boss would slap you across your face if you didn't understand the value of material properties

either because he knows their value derives from the labor that went into them before he bought them, and doesn't want you knowing he's exploiting you (he is), or he's just as much of a cuck as you are.

>dont be a fox news sheepie
>every other news source is marxist
>only real journalists are marxist

there is a fundamental problem in your logic

>If I go for a walk and find a diamond lying on the ground I didn't expend any labor at all but it's still worth a shit ton. There are rough diamonds lying around in some areas, like in Canada.

when we speak of labor, we always mean socially necessary labor time, not the individual labor of one man "finding" a diamond. thus, while your particular diamond took a few moments to find, on average, when you abstract labor, the amount of labor-hours required to dig into the earth, find a chunk of diamond, extract it from the earth, cut it, carve it, and set it into jewelry, not to mention the amount of labor spent in transporting it between and among the different laborers who perform each of these tasks, is immense. not to mention as others have mentioned artificial supply shortages, which do in fact drive up demand, as well as subjective factors, but these are all external to the VALUE of the good, relating only to its PRICE, or the EXPRESSION of that value which is socially determined.

But marxists refuse government since forever, I don't know where this social democrats = marxist meme comes from, but americans sure love it.

value =/= price

Foucault, Sartre and Simone are much more nietzscheans than marxists, specially, and that's a BIG specially, Foucault.

I know you're talking about the Frankfurt school because of muh cultural marxism, but you'ven ever read them

Zizek is a marxist, but hardly guilty about any of that.

Also, analysis of discourse comes from hermeneutics, and modern hermeneutics stem directly from Heidegger, who was pretty much the opposite of a marxist.

I have a professor who I used to be friends with, and once I had to write an article on Debord, and on the bibliography, which I knew no one would read, I just put "you know exactly what, Huizinga, Debord and your stuff".

He later told me he did it himself, but if the university ever found out, they could fuck me (and him for accepting) on a small scale for lack of academic rigor or some shit.

You can deny it, but can't refute it.

They're presenting you their argumments, you're literally replying with made up numbers.

Marx lived in the apex of 19th century industrial revolution, in Berlin and London, two of the most urbanized cities back then, while you're probably some titty NEET living either in a college dorm or in Culdesacsville, WASPahoma, USofA

stop thinking about philosophy in terms of refutation. it's not easily comprehensible evolutionary process.

I don't, I just pointed out if this guy can't work on theology's therms, he can't say it's right or wrong

i know, it was more directed at him.

Asking someone to prove a negative is a fallacy you'd know if you actually studied philosophy.

two sides of the same commie coin

The greentext quote was showing how marx would shit on social democrats. I did not say social democrats are true marxists, but they self identify and attempt to follow him like a messiah. Also I dont know where you are getting the idea thats marxists REFUSE government. Marxism/ Communism is a mode of government. Marx acknowledged the usfulness of capitalism and recognized that it is a necessary phase. Marx's rejection of government was that a government is unable to cure inequality and it needs to be a social movement. It has to come from ones private life rather than public life.

>I want an honest answer.... I don't understand why many still cling to him...

The problems Marx addressed were popular problems, and have remained popular to this day. Keeping that in mind, it's easy to understand why one of the earliest and most prolific authors on the subject of capitalism and its connections to those problems is still widely read. Easy, that is, unless you've not bothered reading any of his work yourself and don't trust anyone who says it's worth the time. Marx had contemporaries who were better known, more prolific, and respectable to boot. Their work just wasn't that good, so no one gives a shit about them anymore.

>Is it nostalgia, many people simply can't leave the 60s alone.

I genuinely can't tell whether you're an out-of-touch antiquarian referring to the 1860s, or a philistine who thinks Marx wouldn't matter if people would get over the 1960s.

>is it more of an aesthetic appeal to the ideas of Marx, without actually thinking about its practicality

Marx rarely suggested practical models for anything, and the exceptions were very context-sensitive. You can't take the Critique of the Gotha program or the Manifesto and try to make it a modern political platform—that would, ironically, be fundamentally opposite Marx's method for forming those historical programs. If you spent any time actually engaging with Marx's work, you would know that.

>I think many academics remain marxist, not because they honestly think it is applicable, but because that is the reference frame they have viewed society through their whole academic career...its hard for many to adopt a new approach

His work was good. As is usually the case with good work, it was built upon and adapted. However, I suspect you mean 'Marxist' as a political slur rather than a type of analyst. There is no simple way to explain this to the uninitiated. Marxism as a method of work is not a political movement or ideology. I understand that it is popular to use the term as a reference to the Soviet Union or a specific brand of socialist ideology, but popular usage has no place in academia where terms must have definite meaning.

tl;dr: People 'cling' to Marx because his work was good.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Have you even read the wiki on Marx?

that fallacies are only important in formal debate is something you'd know if you'd studied philosophy.

>Marxism/ Communism is a mode of government.

Wrong on both counts! astounding.

His ideas have been corrupted by the Jewish bourgeoisie.
Hell, he even said he wasn't a Marxist, shortly before his death.

Uhh, that wasn't him refuting his own ideas but going against the idea of making a political "brand" out of his ideas. People were already calling themselves marxists during his lifetime and I think it's easy to see why a theorist would be put off by that kind of blind allegiance to your theories. It's a very common reaction for any kind of intellectual or artist when your work becomes some kind of movement or brand of idea.

If value were determined solely by the composition of raw materials, then profit would literally be impossible. If you purchase raw materials to produce a commodity in a universe without labor theory of value, then the final product would cost just as much as the raw materials used to produce it. The reason profit is possible at all is because the labor of transforming materials into a commodity adds value to the final product.

Because he offers the most serious critique of Capitalism available.

There is also no time limit on being a Marxist. The collapse of the Soviet Union does not invalidate Marxist critique.

>refuted countless times.

Refuted by your standards, but not by the standards of Marxism itself.

>greater

Do you mean more influential? More "correct"?

Because most people who criticise Marxism on this board and elsewhere on the internet make the same fundamental mistakes that do not really require an explanation, and can be satisfied by simply reading it for yourself.

Not to mention most of them are not actually interested in a sincere discussion, and would rather just express their feelings on the subject and then be done with it.

>against people reading Marx, even critically
I bet you complain about censorship all the time you dense fucking faggot.

because he was simply offering a critique on capitalism, which was valid. however, he didn't offer a better solution and that's where Marx and his brain dead followers lose any respectable footing. he's fun to read and write papers on, but outside of the critical world, he only appeals to lazy, do nothing college kids who dream of a world where they no longer have to work.

>Just Google it

But then you have to separate insightful critiques of Marx's models of society from screeds on how he's the final boss of western degeneracy.

This is complete bullshit. Sociology has evolved since Marx, and even before him there was great sociologists. Look at Bourdieu, Tardieu, Tocqueville... Here we're more speaking about his political works

Your "critiques" stink of something scrapped together from secondary sources that never read or understood Marx. Is there any argument more lazy than

>yeah he had some good points but it doesn't work in the REAL world

or in your case "critical" world. whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.

It's hard for nobodies and intellectuals to let the dual dream of collectivism and central planning go.

he is right though, kinda

no marxist (or leftist for that matter) has offered a truly workable alternative for capitalism; 20th century communist projects failed miserably, there was something horribly wrong somewhere, probably right from the start. any half-responsible marxist should accept this and work on it

just a harsh truth for us leftists. the alternative is still to be worked out and the current project should be precisely that working out

>us leftists
samefag detected

>An explanation of the problem is no great feat
someone who has never read any of the 3 volumes of capital shouldn't say this. and i know you haven't, since anyone who has read any of the 3 volumes of capital would never say this.

The failure of the 20th century leftist experiment is no more of a death sentence than the early failures of capitalist society.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Republic_of_Central_America
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Colombia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peru–Bolivian_Confederation
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Provinces_of_the_Rio_de_la_Plata
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Brazil
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Grande_do_Sul#Guarani_Wars
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entre_Ríos_Province
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Mexican_Empire

Leftists need to be critical of the material circumstances and ideological shortcomings that led to the failure of the great leftist experiment without forgoing it altogether.