I'm looking for a concise book about communism, the ideas of Marx or modern communists...

but that's actually a sensible position compared to marxist fantasies

no it's not. he's a statist bourgeois piece of shit and I'll paint my house in his blood come the inevitable revolution

you'll have to leave your mom's basement first, nerd

Marginal utility theory of value doesn't disprove the labor theory of value when it comes to goods with low profit margins or with no profit margins (no profit margin goods are used to sell higher profit margin goods).

You realize that utility isn't the only concept used in modern economic theory right? That's fucking retarded.

We have this thread every fucking day. I refuse to believe you motherfuckers don't do this to deliberately stirr up shit.

>I'm looking for arguments with a differing view than mine.
>THIS IS A TROLL THREAD
you're pathetic

>not knowing that Veeky Forums just recycles the most successful bait threads on a semi random timer

i like to imagine some deep learning engineer has created scripts to do this from his palo alto townhouse, but probably it's just some nerd in indiana doing it for free by hand

Makoto Itoh, The Basic Theory of Capitalism

Ernest Mandel, The Development of Marx's Economic Thought

Ernest Mandel, Introduction to Marxian Economic Theory

Ernest Mandel, Marxian Economic Theory

this thread will be the one to finally settle the great debate between marxists and the real world though so it's not all been in vain

>Period. That's how it works.

Not an argument.

How about you use the archive instead of shitting this place up with politics. Nothing good has ever come from the various right and left wing literature threads.

>Period. That's how it works.

>It's not.

>understand?

>These are just facts.

Why do you write like this? This is intellectual terrorism, even if no one is convinced by it. Stop thinking like a terrorist.

>Nothing good has ever come from the various right and left wing literature threads.
leftypol butthurt is good

>literature stops being literature when it concerns political ideologies

Who are you quoting?

Read R.E. Rowthorn in The Economic Journal

It's pretty obvious you buffoon

Varoufakis?

What exactly are the "economic arguments" non-leftists complain about for achieving communism? That people won't work? A planned economy is like a classroom, your contribution determines how much you receive. Eventually there is enough material wealth that we will only need to work a few hours a week at most. What's so complicated about that?

>What's so complicated about that?
nothing. if I had to summarize my complaints against marxism it would be that it and it's adherents are if anything not complicated enough or a little too simple respectively.

ok but planned economies arent communism, or marxism. planned economies are stalinist revision. lenin's original idea was massive state reinvestment in a mixed-market economy (state capitalism) to have the ussr exceed the productive forces in the west. only then could conversion to communism begin. stalin ruined all that when lenin died. interesting to note that lenin was sending letters to both stalin and his associates, urging them to not let stalin take power. but history beat him.

Neoliberal sheep are literally brainwashed into thinking there will never be enough material wealth to distribute (which isn't the case even now), and that it's an absolute necessity for every single person in society to work 40+ hour weeks.

let me translate this post for people who don't speak communist retard memespeak

"people are mean and life is hard. waaaaaaaaahhh."

Posst-Leninist Russia was an era where war was inevitable, and therefore state capitalism in such a decentralized country wouldn't have been able to achieve the level of military production required to defend itself. The issue is the complete lack of diversification within the Soviet economy that leaders after Stalin and Khrushchev did nothing about.

Let me translate your post:

"I don't believe in facts"

there is a huge problem with people in america being underemployed in part time jobs, i work like 10 hours a week, but i still afford to live on my own and not rely on handouts or mom's tendies...so if the goal of communism is that i shall work less than 40 hours a week, well, i've got that now, so stick it up your ass, commie

If we worked on what people needed and didn't have so many bullshit jobs in different industries, people could chill most of the week. What's so bad about that? Most people hate their jobs, why should they?

>anecdotal argument
ignored

>i'm poor and shitpost all day my life is great

Wake up. The world can do better than this.

>poor

poor compared to what though? silicon valley hipster programmers who work 80 hours a week? ok cool

>complaining about shitposting

if i can't shitpost after your revolution then i don't want it

Humans can do amazing things. With recycling tech and automation we could build everything we want or need within reason. After the revolution you could shitpost or you could take art classes or learn physics, anything you want. Post-scarcity is becoming a reality but the oligarchs currently in charge love power and wealth too much which is why we argue that the system is fucked up.

In the scarcity phase (primary stage of socialism) people would work wage-based jobs and own the means of production, but because many industries like insurance, finance, etc would be unnecessary, there will be more people available to work in vital industries like manufacturing, which means each person works much less and has stable housing, healthcare, and employment (as long as they don't try to sabotage). Within 100 years most manufacturing and technology will be so automated that humans would only need to work in human-centered industries like medicine or research. And the people geared for those fields find them fulfilling and would work for their enjoyment (even today many rich people still work because they want to be fulfilled, we reject the idea that people only work because they don't want to starve). And since more people would be free from menial tasks, there's more minds at work tackling big problems so scientific advancement would rapidly increase, making medicine and engineering even more efficient.

This is obviously a best case scenario, but the key part is seizing the means of production, so the capitalist doesn't steal the wealth you are creating for him. "The boss needs you, you don't need him. Labor is entitled to all wealth it creates."

fair point. do you have sources on the idea that stare capitalism under the NEP could not have have managed a defense industry?

it still seems that state capitalist market economy would "naturally" have diversified its national output in the ways you are suggesting were lacking in the postwar era.

this is exactly why a frankfurt school critique of mass culture is more direly needed than ever. the tendency toward the production of false, ideological pleasures they diagnosed has completely subsumed the cultural unconscious today.

>After the revolution you could shitpost or you could take art classes or learn physics, anything you want.

but i do that now, just because you're too much of a pussy to live the life you want doesn't mean anyone else wants revolution

your entire defense of capitalism rests on us taking your anecdote seriously as barometric for capitalist society at large. there is no reason to do that. you are a reactionary, complicit in the suffering of others.

I *do* have all of those things. I'm studying math at one of the ten best universities in the world. I want the opportunities to be easier to access for everyone. Suffering is unnecessary for a species as intelligent as ours.

>this is exactly why a frankfurt school critique of mass culture is more direly needed than ever. the tendency toward the production of false, ideological pleasures they diagnosed has completely subsumed the cultural unconscious today.

i fail to see how this is a problem, just sounds like a bunch of "stop liking what i don't like" and that's rather unbecoming for a cabal of supposedly serious intellectuals

for anyone who read that other thread with the wannabe math pseud, this is perfect example of how it's easy to blaze through the math curriculum without having a clue about humans or the lives they live

the only people who don't want communism are the people who if they were black in the days of slavery would sell out their fellow nigs aka the spineless the weak the subservient the stupid

If we could have less suffering in the world, that would be bad?

you're foolish for wanting to be a slave to the capitalist instead of taking him down

that's exactly what people in the former soviet union said when they dismantled communism!

>i was an undergrad marxist true believer

yeah ok buddy let me know when you finish your degree and get a job

You know there's other styles of anti-capitalist government, right? Ours doesn't have to look like the USSR.

>being a wagecuck is good you'll see

literal uncle tom

oh look a math major has discovered solution to all of humanity's problems! he's got it all of political economy solved! he knows the answers! turns out humanity was just a quiz and if you cram enough marx you get an 'A'!

Tbqh I'd trust a maths major to work it out more than most of Veeky Forums

>wah i don't want to do any reading so i will reject any ideas different from the ones i was brainwashed in

yes dude you are the only person who has read marx! you ARE a special snowflake!

Marx isn't even that useful anymore. Socialism is a self-evident necessity for anyone with half a brain. Einstein, Dirac, Grothendieck, Laurent Schwartz and Serge Lang were all socialists, not to mention most of the important sociologists and philosophers (and many economists of the past 150 years. So maybe get off your high horse and stop assuming you understand more than they did.

yeah, and many important philosophers of the last 2000 years were christians, if you think that passes as an argument then you didn't learn much doing math

Appeals to authority aren't a real argument, but you specifically said that I as a math major don't know anything, so I had to bring up counterexamples. Damned if I do, damned if I don't.

Anyway this is for OP

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lange_model

the point is, if some political science major sauntered into some faggy math thread on whatever shitty forums you dudes chill at and said he had all of math solved and anyone who doesn't agree is morally suspect you'd point and laugh, and so i point and laugh at you

>self-evident necessity
>a political ideology
yikes, I think you might be an ideologue

I want to eliminate all human suffering. I see redistribution of the means of production as the best way to do this. I might be wrong, but I would like to test it in the American setting. A society that incentivizes profit over human welfare makes no sense to me. If every banker from the past 200 years studied molecular biology instead, my cancer treatment might have been much easier. But you'll never sympathize because you're an egotist.

somehow a self-evident truth transformed into a personal goal
how interesting

that it "sounds like" that to you is more evidence of your colonization by commodity culture than of any elitism on my part. it's not "stop liking what i dont like" so much as with nothing left worth liking, consumers resort to the least common denominator, stupefying themselves into conformist drones.

where was communism in the ussr?

there's nothing inherently wrong with ideology. in fact to argue that there is is to fall deepest into its grip: for the minute you make it ethical, you assume you can stand outside it.

on the contrary, there are multiple, competing ideologies, and the one you're hawking is conformist, capitalist, and doomed to perpetuate human slavery by the rich.

You sound like a liberal.

t. commie

an ideologue is not simply someone with an ideology
learn how to words

>Father of Sociology
>Marx
That explains why the "science" is bullshit.

>doomed to perpetuate human slavery by the rich
Slavery is not inherently bad.

Op here, sorry i don't frequent Veeky Forums that often.
I mostly go on Veeky Forums, and there's an abundance of threads with literally no arguments, just blind hate and blind devotion to communism.
Personally i dislike communism, i dislike what it's done to my country, however people are still so enticed by it, i wanted to see if there's a book that provides their arguments. Not hoping it would change my mind, but hoping to shed some light.

Main Currents of Marxis by Kolakowski

never implied this. get literate.

the endgame of liberal pluralism is that no argument can topple this one. "slavery is not inherently bad"—we cannot create rational, discursive, statistical arguments against it—doesn't it deserve a seat at the table then? apply the same reasoning, and with a sufficiently abstract historical vantage point, and you can defend nazism, genocide, and attila the hun if you care to. pluralism is in other words reduction to the absurd, the bottom-out point of any argument at which it either appeals to metaphysical ethics or collapses into nothing. because you have chosen the latter in defense of slavery, your argument crumbles along with every other argument anyone could ever care to make. this kind of intellectual terrorism, an inherently violent way of thinking that must childishly smash everything that disagrees with its unconscious suppositions, is rather typical of a slave under capitalism whose imagination has been stilted that he can think no logic other than that obsequiously accepted from his masters, the capitalists themselves. in short the defense of slavery is, in a very literal sense, the slave morality of which nietzsche complained. its negation, the morality of the master, is the one which seeks to destroy all masters, namely, marxism.

Endnotes: LA THESES

"in this society unity appears as accidental, separation as normal"
—Marx, Theories of Surplus Value

1 We live in an era of long-unfolding social crisis, which is fundamentally the crisis of societies organized in a capitalist mode. Indeed, the employment relations that govern production and consumption in capitalist societies are breaking down. The result has been the reappearance of a structural condition that Marx called surplus capital alongside surplus population. Technological transformations continue to take place in spite of economic stagnation, giving rise to a situation in which there are too few jobs for too many people. Meanwhile, huge pools of money scour the earth for profits, leading to periodic expansions of bubbles that burst in massive blowouts. Rising job insecurity and inequality are symptoms of the increasing impossibility of this world as such.

2 In the present moment, these contradictions, formerly contained within capitalist societies, are set to explode. The 2008 crisis was one manifestation of this. It gave rise to a global wave of struggles that is still unfolding today. In order to gain some control over a simmering crisis, states organized coordinated bailouts of financial and other firms. State debt rose to levels not seen since World War II. Bailouts of capitalists thus had to be accompanied by punishing austerity for workers, as states sought to manage their balance sheets while also recreating the conditions for accumulation. Yet these state actions have been only partially successful. Rich economies continue to grow ever more slowly even as they take on huge quantities of debt at every level. Poor economies are also faltering. We call this global situation the holding pattern and assert that further economic turbulence is likely to issue in a capitalist crash landing.

3 Workers fought defensive battles in the twentieth century as they still do today. But then, their defensive battles were part of an offensive struggle: workers sought to organize themselves into a labor movement, which was growing ever more powerful. This movement would sooner or later expropriate the expropriators in order to begin to build a society organized according to the needs and wants of workers themselves.

4 However, the post-1970s crisis of capitalism, which for many should have spelled its end, led to a deep crisis of the labor movement itself. Its project is no longer adequate to the conditions workers face. Most fundamentally, this is because of the decline of the centrality of industrial work in the economy. With the onset of deindustrialization and the decline in the manufacturing share of employment (which was itself one of the fundamental causes of the expansion of surplus populations), the industrial worker could no longer be seen as the leading edge of the class. In addition, due to rising levels of greenhouse gases, it is apparent that the vast industrial apparatus is not only creating the conditions of a better future–it is also destroying them. Most fundamentally of all, work itself is no longer experienced as central to most people’s identities. For most people (although not everyone), it no longer seems as if work could be fulfilling if only it was managed collectively by workers rather than by bosses.

5 At the same time, the decline of the workers’ identity revealed a multiplicity of other identities, organizing themselves in relation to struggles that had, until then, been more or less repressed. The resulting “new social movements” made it clear, in retrospect, to what extent the homogeneous working class was actually diverse in character. They have also established that revolution must involve more than the reorganization of the economy: it requires the abolition of gender, racial and national distinctions, and so on. But in the welter of emergent identities, each with their own sectional interests, it is unclear what exactly this revolution must be. For us, the surplus population is not a new revolutionary subject. Rather, it denotes a structural situation in which no fraction of the class can present itself as the revolutionary subject.

6 Under these conditions, the unification of the proletariat is no longer possible. This might seem to be a pessimistic conclusion, but it has a converse implication that is more optimistic: today the problem of unification is a revolutionary problem. At the high points of contemporary movements, in occupied squares and factories, in strikes, riots and popular assemblies, proletarians discover not their power as the real producers of this society, but rather their separation along a multiplicity of identity-lines (employment status, gender, race, etc.). These are marked out and knitted together by the disintegrating integration of states and labor markets. We describe this problem as the composition problem: diverse proletarian fractions must unify but do not find a unity ready-made within the terms of this unraveling society.

7 This is why we think it is so important to study the unfolding of struggles in detail. It is only in those struggles that the revolutionary horizon of the present is delineated. In the course of their struggles, proletarians periodically improvise solutions to the composition problem. They name a fictive unity, beyond the terms of capitalist society (most recently: the black bloc, real democracy, 99%, the movement for black lives, etc.), as a means of fighting against that society. While each of these improvised unities inevitably breaks down, their cumulative failures map out the separations that would have to be overcome by a communist movement in the chaotic uproar of a revolution against capital.

8 This is what we mean when we say that class consciousness, today, can only be consciousness of capital. In the fight for their lives, proletarians must destroy that which separates them. In capitalism, that which separates them is also what unites them: the market is both their atomization and their interdependence. It is the consciousness of capital as our unity-in-separation that allows us to posit from within existing conditions–even if only as a photographic negative–humanity’s capacity for communism.

endnotes.org.uk/other_texts/en/endnotes-la-theses

great post

The only people who want communism are losers who don't want to pull their own weight.

>I see redistribution of the means of production as the best way to do this.

Have you read any recent history? Every country that implemented land redistribution caused a huge drop in output and famines.

If you have ever held a job then you know more about the economy and labor than marx ever did,

it doesn't matter if you want it or not it doesn't work.