Marx

But, I believe that most his thought was corrupted into some of the greatest evils of the 20th century. That's just my free market capitalist POV though. He seems too much of an idealist for my liking, Marxism just isn't practical, too dogmatic.

N.B. This isn't true.

Bill

Just to further the Nicky Wire imitations.

Marx's theories are all corrupted now, they were never clearly defined and as thus they were abused: even a clearly defined theory is going to be abused by those who see how to abuse it; one that is not laid out letter by letter is going to be abused even further. That's all I have to say about Marx.

I like Dr pepper.

oh, and I have grown a beard but it's more a lenin, not a marx one. but i have time to work on it.

oh and, marx is classic, obv.

engels did more than pay marx's bills?

Karl Marx, Capital, opened at random at Chapter 8, The Working Day

Oh but and Classic it is very sad the way academia treats marx today although I could just be getting a slanted picture of it all (fuck you Arts and Letters Daily! why isn't there a site just like you that isn't edited by a complete dickhead!?)

We have to restructure or the company will die!!

Marxism as political, social, and esthetic systems= dud.

I remember my friend who's big into economics once explained to me why it is; I'll get back to you on it. I also remember K. R. Popper talking about how "labour power" is exactly the sort of metaphysical obfuscation that Marx supposedly opposes.

I know, I know: fortunately the Versailles bourgeoisie had the good sense to knock some sense into the Communards by killing the fuck out of them!

As for divisions in society, plenty of thinkers since have dealt with these issues without opting for narrow economic determinism or seeing complete overthrow of the system as the only solution. Granted, they might not have been doing it if Groucho hadn't got there first.

"if the only way you address the pope is in latin, don't be surprised if they behave how a person spoken to in latin normally behaves; by replying in latin."

"if the only way you cook collard greens is with ham, don't be surprised if they taste like how things cooked with ham normally taste; delicious."

"if the only way you read a book is right side up, don't be surprised if the text isn't upside down."

"if the only way you count is with ordinal numbers, don't be surprised if you never reach a fraction."

(also groucho was for total overthrow of the system -- closing scenes of night at the opera to thread!)

Actually, this is approaching my point. What reasons is there, besides some Hegelian bollocks, to believe that a dictatorship of the proletariat would put an end to the fundamental causes of class war?

"what reason is there besides some philosophy junk is there to believe that getting rid of sweet and low will get rid of cancer caused by sweet and low?"

"what reason is there besides some crazy 'science' to believe that getting rid of hiv will get rid of aids?"

"what reason is there..."

are the proletariat themselves not creating a division of labour when they elect leaders?

otherwise we'd be like all "omg its the blondes and the brunettes engaged in class warfare, and the people who are between 5'8" and 5'10" are against them ALL"

i thought division of labour is the whole reasons we aren't still living in communes
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2

is marx even a philosopher? also STOP GETTING MARX WRONG -- ie STFU about "dialectical matrerialism", kautsky-boy.

Coming from a sociological rather than economic background, however, I dig the neo-Marxist vibe, big up to the Gramsci massive and Jock Young before he got kinda reactionary.

it is interesting that this happened on radio 4, i think. i mean surely you'd expect someone more middle-class-friendly (soulful despair, or its flipside), like sartre or nietzsche, or hep like foucault (again, is he really a philosopher?), or even zizek.

He was much more, errrrrrrrrr, concerned with women all round

he's not a very good one. i still don't get how anyone living in the 21st century can take this shit seriously

(weber and durkheim aren't philosophers either.)

(engage, why don't you? are all sociologists philosophers?)

i don't really think engaging with you is going too fruitious

i don't really think engaging with you is going to be too fruitious

Oh, and as for the snarky Engels comment above that, then, um, have you actually explored any of his proto-feminist (obviously the phrasing here is too hyperbolic) work? Don't let personal proclivities get in the way of the generation of positive ideas.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n07/john-lanchester/marx-at-193

this is good

What's that Engels quote (I *believe* it is Engels) that essentially goes: "one man wants one thing and another man wants another thing. They both struggle and they both get something else entirely in the end. That is history."

it's put a bit better than that.

What are (1) the best brief explanations of his theory of value and (2) the best critiques of it?

I'm for some strange reason reading Capital, but I'm struggling a bit with the concept of socially necessary labor time as the source of value, which strikes me as pretty much the key to the whole thing.

you've understood it

(i.e, it is as silly as it sounds)

Does it just mean cost of production?

Or I guess rather average cost of production?

I guess the thing is there has always been something about neoclassical theories of value (at least in the very crude form I understand them - haven't thoroughly studied econ or anything) that strike me as incomplete and self-serving of capitalists, and Marx is saying that at least the theories of value prevalent at his time were in fact incomplete and self-serving of capitalists, but I guess maybe Marx, while advancing the ball in a lot of ways, got some things wrong? I wish I had studied econ.

Like the whole version of things in which capitalists are compensated for "risk" always struck me as a misnomer -- it seems to me more that they are compensated for the very fact that they have capital (which I guess equates to what Marx calls the means of production). And neoclassical/neoliberal theories don't seem to want to account for or care much about how or why capitalists got their capital, almost presuming that they must deserve it on their merit. And it seems like that relates to what Marx was critiquing in the theories of his time, but I still can't quite get my mind around the socially necessary labor time concept.

Or rather I think I get what Marx is saying it is, but I'm not sure I understand how/why it's the true center of value according to him.

I'll teach you economics, Hurting

I did a big push to grok marxist economics a year and a bit ago before basically deciding it was a shell game/dead end. At work now but I'll write up some thoughts this weekend and bump the thread. LTV and Cambridge Capital Controversy are both pretty weird niggling things for left econ ppl to be hung up on and I think most sane people have rightly moved on.

I dug the explanation of Marx used in Michael Goodwin's Economix

http://economixcomix.com

But I can't find the page where they describe it in graphic novel form

flopson who do you consider worth reading from a left economics perspective that is not hung up on these not-worth-being-hung-up-on things? Or do you not like lefty economists?

i thought this might be a revive about marx attacking his arse boils with a pair of scissors

my lefty economist bros

Suresh Naidu

doesn't tend to stick his neck out in public debates much, but has written prob the only worthwhile economics content in Jacobin: https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/suresh-naidu/ hopefully once he gets tenure he'll write more or join twitter

Arindrajit Dube

not a blogger or pundit but writes stuff sometimes; his research bestowed a LOT of legitimacy to state minimum wage hikes (he presented that research before congress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABM0_L_5vLw)

JW Mason

often disagree with him but worth reading http://jwmason.org/the-slack-wire/

Chris Dillow

this guy is fucking amazing imo. writes a lot about british politics http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/

Marshall Steinbaum

this guy is kind of annoying to me but worth having around. recently got fired from berkeley's washington center for equitable growth but was immediately picked up by roosevelt institute where he's been doing good shit off the get go such as http://rooseveltinstitute.org/demand_side_dynamism/

http://steinbaum.blogspot.ca/
https://twitter.com/econ_marshall

xp- RE: ass boils; i'm still searching for that reference since James tipped me to that

What is that black monolith thing and why is this the second time it's shown up in an ilx post for me today?

site having problems loading youtube video is my guess?

i think thats what youtube embed with the https left in look like now? i was hoping it just wouldn't embed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABM0_L_5vLw

aha

ok im not the only person having that problem either then

Has anybody read any of Dierdre McCloskey's stuff? I've seen her mentioned positively elsewhere, but all the bits I've encountered seem libertarian-y.

that's because she's a libertarian

I'm only on chapter 4 of Capital so far. The Harvey lectures are very helpful. It's gonna take me forever to finish, but I do find a lot of it interesting, useful and insightful whether or not the LTV really works. Also seeing the source of a lot of received ideas I got just growing up in a left-leaning family.

that's because she's a libertarian

Ah well then I guess that sorts that out.

McCloskey's secret sins of economics is good. The libertarian stuff is easy to filter out.

Or rather I think I get what Marx is saying it is, but I'm not sure I understand how/why it's the true center of value according to him.

― socka flocka-jones (man alive), Thursday, August 11, 2016 12:08 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if i can reconstruct this from memory:

he doesn't say its the source of all value. he says its the source of _some_ value but _all_ profit. but he says also that its a common _measure_ of value. which is to say that two goods put into exchange are incomparable outside of the exchange in a general social way. they become comparable to the extent they're valued in a single universal commodity, money. but what's the way in which disparate things can be valued in a single common way? what does that market price represent? just... itself? or is there some other way to say why some things have some prices, and others have other prices. and the argument goes that there's another "universal" element lying about in aggregate which market values of other things factor through -- labor power, which is a universal factor of production as much as cash is a universal factor of exchange. and so one can go through and sort of work out a "socially average labor hour" and see the price of goods in the market as being to some degree reflective of the socially average labor hours that went into them in toto (and factoring through their constituent bits and the wear on machinery in their production etc), in aggregate. but again, in so doing we also need to look at other components of their value that might not accrue through expenditure of labor, but rather through "rents" etc. and that becomes a whole other complicated thing because we want to think of those rents again in terms of their value as somehow determined vis a vis labor power.

In one passage, Marx set out to answer a puzzle. Changing levels of supply and demand explain why the price of a commodity goes up or down, but does not explain why the equilibrium price of that commodity is what it is. For instance, why are strawberries pricier than apples?

To solve the puzzle Marx relied on the “labour theory of value”. He helped prove that the price of a commodity was determined by how much labour time had gone into it—which showed how workers were exploited. However, he “arbitrarily ruled out the relative desirability or utility of commodities,” says Mr Stedman Jones, which would strike most people as the obvious explanation. The author encapsulates a feeling of many students of Marx: read the dense, theoretical chapters of “Capital” closely, and no matter how much you try, it is hard to escape the conclusion that there is plenty of nonsense in there.

that last part sentence describes my experience exactly

from The Economist's review of the Steadman biography

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21705665-value-marx-21st-century-false-consciousness?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/falseconsciousness

I get the impression that the "socially necessary" part of socially necessary labor time is supposed to help account for desirability. However so far it feels like he's buried that concept and not explained it much, especially compared to how methodically and almost painfully he has fleshed out other concepts. Maybe he comes back to it later?

Maybe he comes back to it later?

*rueful laughter slowly morphs into sullen stare into the abyss of time irretrievably lost asking myself this very question*

https://media.giphy.com/media/Ic97mPViHEG5O/giphy.gif

lol

I think also what's missing from that critique is that according to Marx a higher price for the more "desirable" commodity can't be sustained (assuming equal cost of production) because the more profitable one will attract more investment until competition erases the profit differential. So if strawberries are really considered yummier than apples, but they do in fact take the exact same amount of labor to produce and transport to market (which I doubt is true), more capital will be attracted to strawberry growing until competition among strawberry growers forces prices back toward that of apples. Also according to David Harvey this is all happening in an ideal market world and is not intended to capture everything that happens in the real world -- the concept is purportedly to take the perfect "free market" of classical economics and say "Okay, if you actually had your magical free market, here's how it would actually work and why it would ultimately collapse."

Nonetheless, I feel like Marx uses labor/socially necessary labor time/labor power all in really slippery and confusing ways that he does not adequately flesh out, and it does make me wonder if he's eliding something.

in one of those videos David Harvey says something like 'every time i read Capital i have a different interpretation of it' as if it's a good thing, and i'm like... that's, er, NOT a good quality for an economics book to have

ah the lineage between Das Kapital and Frank Ocean's Blonde

xp

However, he “arbitrarily ruled out the relative desirability or utility of commodities,” says Mr Stedman Jones, which would strike most people as the obvious explanation.

This isn't as nonsensical as it might seem at first blush, in that the amount of labor anyone is willing to expend on bringing an article to market will be just as closely linked to the value of that labor as to its 'desirability or utility'. The idea of 'value' can be applied to either side of the equation, because they are equivalent.

I think also what's missing from that critique is that according to Marx a higher price for the more "desirable" commodity can't be sustained (assuming equal cost of production) because the more profitable one will attract more investment until competition erases the profit differential. So if strawberries are really considered yummier than apples, but they do in fact take the exact same amount of labor to produce and transport to market (which I doubt is true), more capital will be attracted to strawberry growing until competition among strawberry growers forces prices back toward that of apples. Also according to David Harvey this is all happening in an ideal market world and is not intended to capture everything that happens in the real world -- the concept is purportedly to take the perfect "free market" of classical economics and say "Okay, if you actually had your magical free market, here's how it would actually work and why it would ultimately collapse."

there was a debate about this in the 60's when General Equilibrium Theory (now the mainstream theory of the joint determination of prices and quantities of all goods and inputs in a market) was being banged out, this dude called Morishima wrote a book called Marx's Economics kind of summarizing it. it's a bit mathematical but was one of the best things I read

In general equilibrium there actually *IS* no profit differential between the apple and the banana (because firms enter/enlarge production driving the price down whenever there's an arbitrage opportunity), but relative prices are not all equalized. the zero profit thing is a good example of The Equilibrium Paradox (a good blog post on it: http://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/140130680535/the-equilibrium-paradox-somebody-has-to-do-it)

This isn't as nonsensical as it might seem at first blush, in that the amount of labor anyone is willing to expend on bringing an article to market will be just as closely linked to the value of that labor as to its 'desirability or utility'. The idea of 'value' can be applied to either side of the equation, because they are equivalent.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Friday, August 26, 2016 1:40 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nah this is wrong, too. I want to work in a diamond mine because the wage for diamonds is high, not because I want to bring diamonds into the world.

one thing i will say about Marx, at his best he is a great prose stylist. Not as good as Keynes but close. apparently a lot of the het up fiery rhetoric in Communist Manifesto was written by Engels but there are some beautiful passages in Capital.

I think one of the hardest things about reading Marx in the 21st century is just maintaining a clear grasp on his system of terminology, some of which seems counterintuitive today, especially if you're steeped in neoclassical economic ideas (which we p much all are). Like I keep having to remind myself "when he says value he means the amount of socially necessary labor time" and "when he says socially necessary labor time" he means a kind of averaged unit of labor time not the exact number of labor hours it took to produce something, and then I'm like "wait wtf does that actually mean?"

Yup

Nah this is wrong, too. I want to work in a diamond mine because the wage for diamonds is high, not because I want to bring diamonds into the world.

― flopson, Friday, August 26, 2016 1:52 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but marx never suggests otherwise. he's trying to answer the question -- if you have capital to deploy, why do you want to say mine for diamonds instead of coal, and the answer is "you see more opportunity for profit" but the question of why you see more opportunity for profit has to do with _many_ things over time, in part demand, but also in part other relative questions of cost of production.

its also silly to drag general equilibrium into this because marx is not trying to describe a stable system of capital in equilibrium, but rather the a highly dynamic system in constant transformation and disruption, but nonethless with identifiable pressures and tendencies and momentary balances and imbalances.

anyway its totally silly to say marx rules out the relative desirability or utility of commodities -- he begins with that but notes that it well predates capitalism, or even money as a universal medium of exchange. if your complaint is "where are the supply/demand curves" the answer is really "that pertains to distribution but doesn't account for the factors driving and determining choices in production"

if you have capital to deploy, why do you want to say mine for diamonds instead of coal, and the answer is "you see more opportunity for profit" but the question of why you see more opportunity for profit has to do with _many_ things over time, in part demand, but also in part other relative questions of cost of production.

"other relative questions of cost of production" are what determine (wait for it) Supply

its also silly to drag general equilibrium into this because marx is not trying to describe a stable system of capital in equilibrium, but rather the a highly dynamic system in constant transformation and disruption, but nonethless with identifiable pressures and tendencies and momentary balances and imbalances.

you can shock general equilibrium, make firms discover new prices etc, there is a whole literature on it. but it doesn't give you anything like marxism afaik

"where are the supply/demand curves" the answer is really "that pertains to distribution but doesn't account for the factors driving and determining choices in production"

genuinely don't know what this means. pertains to the distribution of what? factors driving and determining choices in production you mean inputs? they're also determined by S&D

> "other relative questions of cost of production" are what determine (wait for it) Supply

but whence the reason for the quantity of that supply.

supply and demand don't explain anything about the general structure of an economy, they just account for how certain prices are set at a certain moment in time.

its like you're looking at a car and you explain everything by saying "this car operates by the conservation of energy". sure the conservation of energy plays a role, but you haven't even begun to look at the broader things one needs to understand to see why the car moves.

a lot of why marx is hard to read is he's not just explaining an approch, but he's very carefully trying to explain why ideas like "the supply of this is determined by the demand for it and also the supply of things to make it" don't get you almost anywhere at all.

you also have to understand that the labor theory of value isn't a unique marxian thing, but already rooted in classical political economy, including smith (though there's a particular and important treatment of it marx gives that's distinct from the predecessors).

> you can shock general equilibrium, make firms discover new prices etc, there is a whole literature on it. but it doesn't give you anything like marxism afaik

right, because there's no premise that there's even such a thing as a general equilibrium to shake -- prices, industries, production, employment are all in continuous and dynamic motion and interaction, constantly moving with regard to political, technological, social, broader economic developments.

this is one of the strangest articles i've encountered in a while. i've read it twice and i have no idea what point is being made:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/i-am-not-a-marxist/

Heads up: Verso is selling all things Marx w/ 50% off, as it's the bicentenary of the big man's birth.

they claim to be left-wing AND YET they’re SELLING marxist books

checkmate, pinkos!

*goes back to being slowly crushed by capitalism, dies*

You should've known better, bg. I'd like to say that I'll be right here waiting for you to get a clue, but I'll hazard a guess that it'll never happen. Sorry to be so harsh, but your words don't mean nothin'.

hey, the Man took 49.5% of my severance pay out in taxes.

Karl was right.

he was only right about 95% of everything, tbf

xp. famous libertarian karl marx

In a rare expression of neediness, I demand that someone acknowledge my astonishingly-clever wordplay a few posts back. Please. It's all I have.

In thread-related news, I've been thinking lately about tackling the immensity of Capital. Would've pulled the trigger had it been included in the sale. WTF.

Although I understand Althusser's companion is highly-regarded so maybe that's a good start.

In a rare expression of neediness, I demand that someone acknowledge my astonishingly-clever wordplay a few posts back. Please. It's all I have.

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llhglhW0IF1qekszro1_500.gif

I still haven't even finished Capital Vol 1, but one thing that strikes me a lot now is how bad a lot of the common criticisms of Marx's theories are, like I'll see one tossed off by some purported economist or political scientist and I'll think, "Um, no, he addresses that a few chapters into Vol 1."

there’s lots of great stuff in marx imo, but as far as his “pure” economic theory goes i think Samuelson’s ‘minor post-Ricardian’ quip is accurate

ive only read pamphlets and shorter works (wage labor and capital, value price and profit, manifesto, napoleon) wonder how much im missing out by not reading capital, which at this point i doubt ill ever do

q for man alive: did marx believe technology was ‘labor-saving’?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the question. If you're asking whether he accounts for the fact that machines increase productivity and enable the same person working for the same number of hours to produce more goods, yes, of course he does. But I doubt that he would frame it as "labor-saving."

I imagine you're getting at the argument that Marx fails to account for the ways in which the rising tide lifts all boats, i.e. if productivity greatly increases it should be inevitable that at least some of those gains go toward improving the standard of living of the workers. I'm kind of agnostic about that, but in recent years that certainly has not been true. It was admittedly dramatically true in the United States and Europe during the 20th century, but it's probably an unanswerable open question how much of that was the gains flowing to the workers vs the workers demanding a piece of the gains (e.g. through socialist and communist political action, the labor movement, etc.). You can also certainly point to places in the world where it does not seem to be the case, e.g. where effective slave labor continues in wealthy gulf countries.

On the other hand capitalism begins to really need mass consumerism to flourish, so it kind of needs some of that wealth and purchasing power to flow to the people on the bottom. But I think marx and marxists would say that capitalism is self-destructive in the long run and doesn't know what's best for itself, and therefore eventually capitalism begins to erode that same purchasing power in its dumb search for new avenues of profit.

the moral of das kapital: marx's dad was a judge (imagine that) and engels was an outrageously privileged trustfunder which is why they failed to effectively relate to the proletarian class. (see also 'frankfurt school, the')

I went to the hq of the French communist party today. They were selling goofy tshirts and coffee mugs.

That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. Das Kapital has nothing to do with “relating” to the proletarian Class, it’s just a description of how an economy would work if it actually behaved according to classical economics. The manifesto is the work aimed at “relating” to people and it was enormously popular and successful.

last year i struggled through the first several hundred pages of Capital with the help of David Harvey's videos before burning out. i learned enough to know that it is not a book that can be easily summed up in one sentence

I mean that kind of brings me back to my above point - if you can’t be bothered to read Capital, I don’t blame you, because it’s a slog and I haven’t gotten through it either. But don’t make shit up about it just so you feel better dismissing it.

man alive otm.

also marxism as a project isn't about "relating" to people in the focus group/pandering sense but about to appealing to them as human beings with an innate craving for freedom and dignity. the idea is to abolish the working class, not fetishize working class culture.

also speaking of the frankfurt school, there is no contradiction even in adorno's hatred of popular culture and his commitment to marxism as a political project. maybe it's mandarin and condescending, but it was coherent. for him modernism was about breaking the spell of false consciousness; popular art was about naturalizing capitalist social relations, which is why it was the enemy.

I imagine the answer is probably yes x 100, but has anyone ever undertaken to sort of “reimagine” Capital in a contemporary context, using modern examples and language and responding to today’s popular economic arguments? I think part of its problem is that it made a lot more sense in its historical context. David Harvey did help me understand that better but it seems like there ought to be an easier way.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but perhaps the answer is Ernest Mandel and 'Late Capitalism'?

That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. Das Kapital has nothing to do with “relating” to the proletarian Class

yeah okay guy

"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/index.htm

marx inspired massive working class movements across the globe that shook the foundations of capitalism. the project failed; the experiments in almost every nation were catastrophic; but his problem was never that he was marginal. he did change the world.

you don't say. he still failed in his project, if you haven't noticed. my point is his remarkable privilege and engels even more remarkable privilege played a role in that failure. somehow that keeps getting brushed aside in marxist studies, probably because studying marx at an advanced level is mostly the province of the privileged. see, for example, the frankfurt school

marx lived in poverty for most of his life.

also i'm not sure marxist academics are all that privileged, given that most of them are toiling away in precarious adjust jobs in humanities and social science departments

al gore flies on planes

marx lived in poverty for most of his life.

tell that to his london housekeeper

i've never had a housekeeper

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helene_Demuth

qualmsley proves his point about "the moral of" Das Kapital by quoting a completely different work by Marx? that seems... misguided.

Marx set about to accomplish two major goals. One was to analyze capitalism, especially its inherent faults and internal contradictions, and the other was to replace it with something he conceived would be better. Das Kapital was his most complete attempt to accomplish the first goal. He definitely engaged in other activities and wrote many other treatises pursuant to the second goal. Scrambling everything together into one mess is just sloppy. Das Kapital stands on its own merits or mistakes, but it was never about 'relating to' the proletariat.

das kapital was never finished. who knows how marx would have ended it

and that proves?

i think there has been criticism of marx from feminists especially. the salient point with helene demuth wasn't that he employed her as a domestic worker--that was vastly more common in the 1800s and not a marker of wealth, really--but that he fathered a child with her.

marx was a bad husband and father. he didn't work which made his family suffer in poverty in london. there are plenty of defects in his character. i would be more comfortable pointing to those specifically than this vague broadside about how "privileged" he was or wasn't, which seems irrelevant

Das Kapital was actually going to end: "And therefore if you add up all of these units of labor power you get...wait, WTF, Capitalism is good now?"

I don't even know if it's fair to call the Soviet Union a "failure" -- it lasted nearly 80 years and industrialized and modernized huge swaths of agrarian Russia.. It was perhaps not the model of what we would want a society to look like, but neither was Tsarist Russia.

Better than you can say for many regimes, including some liberal/capitalist ones.

i'll call it a failure without reservation. the regime stalin created was at least a betrayal of the hopes of the petersburg soviet that seized power in 1917

it should be measured against its own claims, i think, not against some external marker. the form of life that was created was dull and bureacratic at best and, at its worst, marked by like, constant terror and assaults on the truth. it was nothing like a free association of free people

I think that's fair.

It should also be measured against what came before and after - compared to Tsarist Russia and post-Soviet Russia, the Soviet Union was a success. Some of its greatest failings need to also be contextualized in terms of the hostility of Western powers (from the Civil War) and trauma of the world wars. We can criticize their heavy hand in Eastern Europe as quasi-imperialist but it wasn't just an idle conversation among the western powers to immediately launch an attack on the USSR.

Measured against its claims and what a socialist state could be, the Soviet Union was a failure.

qualmsley's probably funding those stupid GOP with a hammer and sickle billboards

(you should also apply those standards to every other state... like the US)

Yes, there's that whole issue of capitalist interference in socialist and communist countries, which I think is important to recognize, because those countries probably would have been more successful otherwise. But OTOH it is/was a fact of the real world that communism and socialism had to compete with other ideologies. Capitalism out-competed them, at least in the historical short run, probably because it was more productive. That hyper-productivity may not be good for humanity in the long run, but it was certainly good for creating a military superpower that no one could keep up with without going bankrupt.

i think forced collectivization was a failure. a moral failure, and a failure for the socialist project because it blackened the reputation of socialism for generations. so the way stalin tried to establish socialism--if that's what he really wanted to do; i read parts of kotkin's bio and he argues that it indeed was--then he failed in a very serious way.

(you should also apply those standards to every other state... like the US)

― louise ck (milo z)

do i have a history of defending the united states that i don't know about?

Slow down with the defensiveness, did I say you did?

Stalin isn't the entire story of the Soviet Union, of course.

Ive been listening to Richard Wolff’s talk here this evening, which I quite like, given in Spring 2016. Provides a great overview to history and Marxist theory

http://www.youtube.com/v?=a1WUKahMm1s

hmmm, the link doesn't seem to be working (for me at least), and he has several videos on there. what's the title?

qualmsley's probably funding those stupid GOP with a hammer and sickle billboards

thesis 1: marx was german not russian iirc. thesis 2: i love marx but he wasn't perfect. thesis 3: i forget

KM, kingfish might mean this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L33Hhs0zv8

Oops, I formatted the link wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1WUKahMm1s

jesus fucking christ

qualmsley i hope you were smashed because jesus fucking christ

fanboys itt

Marx' economic theory may have been important and the result of thorough, original work, but surely his political ideas were m/l unfounded?

if anything they've held up better

class conflict as historical model showing a lot fewer cracks these days than, say, newtonian mechanics

yeah I was more thinking about his ideas abt communism

newtonian mechanics et al can be proven/disproven tbf

great name for a local auto-repair business though!

LOL

thesis 4: you're damn right i was smashed; sundays are for symposia. thesis 5: jesus fucking christ was a socialist in an impoverished traveling commune way before germany was even a thing, who was tortured and killed young for his beliefs, unlike karl, who died in his study at his desk almost twice as old as jesus on golgotha. thesis 6: all philosophy is a footnote to plato*. thesis 7: pass me the bloody mary mix you parcel of euthyphros. thesis 8: pounds table. thesis 9: >burp< thesis 10: impoverished children of the world unite!

*and achilleus was the first class warrior; fuck agamemnon

julius caesar was writing about germania pre jesus

i'm not sure that citing Jesus as a positive force for anti-capitalist values instead of Marx is borne out much by the entire fucking history of the world

marx is a positive force for anti-capitalist values, one of the most dynamic who ever lived! but he wasn't perfect! lost in scapegoating and piling on me for some reason is my original point that growing up as privileged as he did might handicap one rhetorically later on in life in the project of arresting a tide of capitalism that has seen the biggest gap between rich and poor in recorded human history here in the old US of A in the here and now under donald fucking trump and rupert fucking murdoch

I wrote in an essay once* "marxists believe that..." and then quoted something from the communist manifesto. and my tutor scrawled double underlined "marxists do NOT believe this!!" ... so I'm still basically unsure about what Marxism actually is, and the more I read the less clear I get.

(*It was just before I switched from a Social Sciences to a maths degree. )

Wait, how privileged do you think he was?

as a straight white male im not touching that, trevor

way more than anyone i grew up around, frederik

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Marx

How was he limited do you think? What part of his analysis would have been different if he was working class?

"this Hegelian philosophy stuff is a reet load of bollox, off t'pub?"

his often obtuse syntax, that experts still struggle with, doesn't seem aimed at the joe six-packs of the 19th century

the condescension is worse in the much more privileged engels. for instance

"Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm

i've known lots of people who don't suffer from 'false consciousness' as engels would understand it so much as a playful nihilistic fatalism about the possibility of change for the better resulting from growing up broke or worse

. . .

medicare / social security for all!

False consciousness in marxist theory isnt just somethinf the working class suffer from that engels, for instance, would say he had broken free from.

It’s not really condescending. The theory is we think according to the terms provided by our age which prevents us from being able to see other ways things could be. They turn to the dialectic because they don’t believe the theorist can simply step “outside” their circumstances and understand things from a god’s-eye view. Insight comes from struggle, from working through the “contradictions” of the age as part of a shared project. It’s the opposite of codescending.

The pre-marxist socialists were more elitist—designing utopias. Marx and Engels brought socialism back to earth by centering it in the class struggle.

yes! definitely! but i would add that sometimes when marxists discuss 'false consciousness' they fail to grasp how much delight fatalistic poor people take in 1) kayfabe antics of crude brazen assholes like trump and 2) playing dumb themselves in the face of seemingly comfortable lefties perplexed by what they (the poor people) experience as a pantomime of false consciousness (perhaps their only sustained act of creativity!) in a world that has been materially crueler to them than it has to many do-gooders. this is not a dismissal of marx or engels! this is monday morning hungover QBing two transcendent philosophers

I don't really see "owning the libs" type shit as being a significantly different formulation from any other "false consciousness"

As we all know, it was only poor people who voted for Trump.

tbf this kind of thing has been extensively thrashed out in adorno vs. kracauer/benjamin and the rich literature following them, all of which depends on having marx as (one) starting point, so we might not really be able to talk about it without marx. but i still think the point stands that the "manifesto" and "capital" are two different works, and if you gripe about the convoluted academic prose in the one that's aimed at a convoluted academic conversation, as evidence that he couldn't relate to the working class, i feel like that needs to be supplemented in the ways that have been asked for upthread: which specific points in the theory would be different if he did not have as much privilege (however much it was)? why?

the language is also convoluted because it's translated from german, of course, but it's fair to say that when he wanted to write in a different register he could. i've been reading marshal berman's /all that is solid melts into air/ and he's otm about the lyricism and rhetorical force of the manifesto, which now sounds like MLK to my ears.

not sure we really need another "soviet union C/D?" discussion but i will go ahead and call any regime that kills tens of millions of people a failure, versus the admittedly external, a priori standard of "murder is bad." that applies whether its initial stated goal is "we will create a socialist utopia" or "we will kill tens of millions of people." we can argue about the causality of that failure as much as any other ("did the electric car fail because of conspiring powerful interests or because the technology wasn't there?") but surely it was a failure. not sure that has much bearing on marx though since the history of the 20th century suggests a range of other common denominators for mass murder at this scale, of which the development of totalitarian bureaucratic states looms largest.

good points Doc

what I meant is that ideas about fx the dictatorship of the proletariat seem free flying fantasy compared to Marx' economic analysis

a relevant point about the style and prose of Capital is that it's actually relatively accessible, despite clearly written for an academic audience. he throws in lots of little witticisms and jokes, some of which i had to read a footnote to understand because they were inside-19th-century-philosopher-jokes, but still. generally it is difficult to read because of the ideas it contains (and the concepts that require defining, at least for me) rather than the way in which he wrote it, and that comes through even via translation.

thesis 11: marx/engels are the lennon/mccartney to hegel's elvis. sober or otherwise i prefer the hits to their deep cuts

class conflict as historical model showing a lot fewer cracks these days than, say, newtonian mechanics

― difficult listening hour, Monday, September 17, 2018 4:09 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a weird thing to say. newtonian mechanics is as essential as quantum or relativistic mechanics. they apply under different conditions.

This was in the lobby of a chain hotel I stayed in

https://i.imgur.com/Ptoj1XC.jpg

The internet has done so much damage we can never know or measure.

so just coming from watching the first episode of the norm macdonald has a show show and i couldn't help but notice david letterman is looking more like a malnourished karl marx

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the question. If you're asking whether he accounts for the fact that machines increase productivity and enable the same person working for the same number of hours to produce more goods, yes, of course he does. But I doubt that he would frame it as "labor-saving."

― Fedora Dostoyevsky (man alive), Saturday, September 15, 2018 9:26 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

labor-saving is like, it used to take 3 capital and 3 labor to produce one unit of output, but with new technology it takes 2 machines and 1 hour of work. both became more productive but labor has a smaller relative increase in marginal productivity along constant factor shares. so in the long-run, output relies on a tiny sliver of labour relative to capital, and the wage rate relative to the return on capital goes to zero. there's parts of marx where he sounds very labor-saving. for example, from wage labor and capital:

But we have already seen that, with every advance in the use of machinery, the constant component of capital, that part which consists of machinery, raw material, etc., increases, while the variable component, the part laid out in labour-power, decreases.

tbc, i asked because you said

one thing that strikes me a lot now is how bad a lot of the common criticisms of Marx's theories are, like I'll see one tossed off by some purported economist or political scientist and I'll think, "Um, no, he addresses that a few chapters into Vol 1."

and 'marx thought technology was labor-saving' is a common criticism of marx often tossed off by purported economists :)

Quite a few Capital reading groups springing up lol

Time for quarantine Capital reading groups.https://t.co/M9XTfhol3n

— Prada-Meinhof (@Prada_Meinhof) April 8, 2020

Grimes in Los Angeles today.

Photography by Jvshvisions pic.twitter.com/b2kemGSYhU

— GRIMES CHARTS (@GrimezszCharts) October 2, 2021

some cool ideas in the communist manifesto but i’m more into crypto gaming UBI pic.twitter.com/u0BdNH4tmV

— james hennessy (@jrhennessy) October 3, 2021

thats right

Wasn't gamer UBI the plot to one of the first Black Mirror episodes

Marx: Vampire capitalism “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire like lives only by sucking living labor”

Economics research: “After a plasma center opens nearby, demand for payday loans falls by over 13% among young borrowers.” https://t.co/qO0gr620fM

— Albert Pinto (@70sBachchan) August 20, 2024

Damn, we're getting ripped off. My wife gives it for free!

I could never be a blood donor, too squeamish

I thought about doing a single bone marrow donation so I can say I did my part, but I'm not sure how that works... I have no idea what my blood type is, tbh

Ironically, the payday loan business itself is a 10x better illustration of that quote than the plasma bank.

in the current LRB adam tooze writes

If we are to achieve an energy transition, it will not follow a familiar timetable. It must mark a fundamental break with an otherwise irresistible logic of accumulation. It doesn’t require unanimity or consensus. It doesn’t require that no one is left behind. What it does require is a powerful coalition to impose its will, to make history in the most radical sense. It is hard not to be reminded of the contrast drawn by Marx between, on the one hand, our existing state of ‘prehistory’, in which we live in a confused turmoil, buffeted by contradictory social forces that we glimpse only through the distorting lens of ideology, and, on the other, the promise of an era of autonomous history-making to come, in which humanity will direct its destiny. As Fressoz describes it, a true energy transition would require nothing less.

What it does require is a powerful coalition to impose its will, to make history in the most radical sense.

There is nothing new about a small group with control over the necessary resources using its power to impose their will on a society - and imposing their will on its neighbors, too. What would be exceptional would be if this were done for any motive other than a desire to increase that group's wealth and power over society.

xp I couldn't find any passages by Marx himself that spell out that view of "autonomous history-making" quite so explicitly, but passages by Engels are fairly easy to find:

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man's own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history, pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

- Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

hell yes that’s the stuff

The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature

Reads like a bad parody of 19th century triumphalism.

In other news https://www.instagram.com/p/DFFn5F1svj5/?igsh=MWM1Z3ozMXhwcW9tcw==

If we are to achieve an energy transition, it will not follow a familiar timetable. It must mark a fundamental break with an otherwise irresistible logic of accumulation

95% of electricity produced in france is from sources that don’t emit carbon. they didn’t fundamentally break with the logic of accumulation (whatever that means..) they just didn’t have a big anti-nuclear movement so they still have reactors providing 75% and so a modest increase in solar and wind got them close to 100%

i feel like all of history is crises happening and humanity just muddling through shittily. the fantasy that what we need is to all snap out of it and act decisively to seize our destiny seems naive

That reading has its own naivities too.

france was able to achieve that by, like much/all of the west, simply offshoring the production of much of its material needs. it’s not just electricity production that requires oil, coal and gas. i read somewhere lately that china has produced more concrete and steel construction in the last 20 years than all other countries in history combined.

anyway the whole piece is here - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/adam-tooze/trouble-transitioning

i can understand being uneasy around engels’ talk of humans having “dominion” over the earth but i read it more as the goal being humans having dominion over themselves. we all agree that the public school system needs help but none of us seem to be able to do anything about it. wars break out, there is a climate emergency, and even the most powerful people on earth seem to only dimly or partially grasp at the outlines to solutions. when we will start acting like grown ups?

when will we realise that we are all brothers and sisters?

france was able to achieve that by, like much/all of the west, simply offshoring the production of much of its material needs

that's actually not true. consumption-based emissions (which account for carbon emitted in imports) in france declined from 9t tons to about 6t tons in 2022, larger than the reduction in territorial inputs (https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2). consumption-based emissions are larger in absolute terms than territorial emissions, but the gap has been flat or shrinking, not widening, over the last 20 years

(however, in my previous post i was only talking about electricity, not total emissions. france imports some electricity but is actually a net exporter of electricity. it's actually the largest exporter of electricity in europe by a comfortable margin https://www.ans.org/news/article-5844/france-leads-europe-as-largest-2023-energy-exporter/)

it’s not just electricity production that requires oil, coal and gas. i read somewhere lately that china has produced more concrete and steel construction in the last 20 years than all other countries in history combined.

they're also burning more coal than the rest of the world combined, and building more coal plants (around 95% of all new coal plants, singlehandedly pushing estimated peak coal out to 2027 now per the IEA), at the same time as they're building more solar and wind capacity than the rest of the world combined lol. and that's a country where, at least politically, there's nothing stopping the ccp elite from fundamentally breaking with the logic of accumulation and doing a hard pivot to clean energy; no other country has as strong a hand in the market

energy transition is weird. in 2024 texas installed more solar capacity than the rest of the united states combined (also leading in new installed wind capacity), installing about 8 times more than california, where there is a lot more democratic will to break the logic of accumulation for environmental means. texas isn't building solar and wind because they're green, but because it's a cheap source of energy (falling from 100$ per watt in the seventies to pennies today)... which is why trump is passing executive orders to ban it

ok - so do you think tooze is wrong? that we actually have done real energy transitions in the past, dispensing with old forms of energy production in favour of new ones, and that we can use those transitions as a guide for how we might accomplish what we need to accomplish as a planet?

ok - so do you think tooze is wrong? that we actually have done real energy transitions in the past, dispensing with old forms of energy production in favour of new ones, and that we can use those transitions as a guide for how we might accomplish what we need to accomplish as a planet?

That doesn’t seem like a very good guide tho

my reading from the excerpt was that he's saying *all* energy transitions are disruptive and don't follow a familiar pattern, so why would this one

maybe not. actually, i realized i don't care, so count me out of this convo if you haven't already

new board description lol

france was able to achieve that by, like much/all of the west, simply offshoring the production of much of its material needs. it’s not just electricity production that requires oil, coal and gas. i read somewhere lately that china has produced more concrete and steel construction in the last 20 years than all other countries in history combined.

anyway the whole piece is here - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/adam-tooze/trouble-transitioning

This fact appears in that very same article you link to (and FWIW I mentioned this in the LRB thread)

oh yeah duh.

i’m very interested to understand your POV here flopson because you obviously have some expertise. it just seems to me like it’s beside the point if this country or that country have reduced emissions, if, in toto, the planet is burning more coal than it ever has before. it doesn’t feel like we’ve “transitioned” from coal

when will we realise that we are all brothers and sisters?

― Tracer Hand

what i hate is that if i say "well hold on non-binary people exist too" i sound like a scold and i don't say it that way, it's just one of the challenges of... we're all so different that even words can be hard, sometimes.

happy to add one! equally happy to call you a brother and a sister - whatever it takes!

Are the “marxist equity programs” actually Marxist?

Are the “marxist equity programs” actually Marxist?

and can I extract my Marxist equity during my lifetime using a Marxist reverse mortgage?

ok - so do you think tooze is wrong? that we actually have done real energy transitions in the past, dispensing with old forms of energy production in favour of new ones, and that we can use those transitions as a guide for how we might accomplish what we need to accomplish as a planet?

― Tracer Hand, Sunday, 26 January 2025 15:17 (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

like on some level tooze can’t be wrong. it’s tautologically true that, if the whole world snapped into unison tomorrow and delivered a loud clear democratic demand for forceful action on climate, and policy makers listened, we’d figure shit out

but it doesn’t feel like a good diagnosis of where things are at, and where climate progress is likely to come from at (to use one of tooze’s favorite phrases) The Current Impasse 😎

sadly, democratic will is often against doing anything (in canada our carbon tax is deeply unpopular and repealing it now has tripartisan support), deployment of clean energy infrastructure is running up against the “small-c” conservation strain of the environmental movement that use nimby-like tactics to delay or block development of solar in places like california, and to a large extent the future global carbon emissions path isnt about how far rich western countries decarbonize, but what energy mix countries like china and india will pursue. its still good to democratically agitate for climate action, but as a matter of global political economy i think he’s kind of lost the plot

I'm not sure Tooze meant a democratic process. Not really sure what he meant. This is kind of suggestive but vague:

It doesn’t require unanimity or consensus. It doesn’t require that no one is left behind. What it does require is a powerful coalition to impose its will, to make history in the most radical sense.

It sounds more like Marxist cosplay than a workable roadmap.

The burger reveals that there are two types of people, in the end: First are those who believe that a technologically complex society is impossible without these horrors or, at the very least, without the continual threat of starvation imposed by the artificial scarcity of basic necessities. In other words, they earnestly believe that people will not work at all unless compelled to on threat of death, and that this alone justifies social domination as the necessary stimulus for the creation of any social surplus whatsoever. Second are those who know that the entire history of humanity demonstrates the exact opposite to be true—that domination is not a necessity but is instead a vast and violent social ritual imposed on people by people and that it can therefore also be overthrown by people. The rule of the burger is, in the end, just as natural or necessary as the divine right of kings. In other words, a technologically complex society capable of producing material abundance (in fact, luxury) for all is perfectly possible and it can be administered deliberatively by all the members of this society without threatening the majority of the world’s population with starvation, and without subjecting millions across the planet to medieval horrors in order to secure the comfort of a chosen few. Moreover, all of this can be done with less energy than we use now, with a smaller material footprint, and on less land put to better use rehabilitating the metabolism of the human species with its environment.19 But creating such a future requires first recognizing that the point of social struggle is not to work for the burger, to eat the burger, to strike to increase the labor share of income and guarantee more burgers for more workers, or even to seize all the burgers and place them under the control of the workers. The point is to unmake the very way that the burger itself is made. And this future can only be secured through a protracted war waged against the hamburger as it currently exists, against its defenders, and against its false critics.

https://brooklynrail.org/2025/02/field-notes/quarter-pounds-of-flesh-2/

Too many burgers in this piece but the goal has always been the above.

I got some impossible chicken nuggets the other day and they were pretty good!

a technologically complex society capable of producing material abundance (in fact, luxury) for all is perfectly possible and it can be administered deliberatively by all the members of this society

First half of that is demonstrably true. It's the second half where everything tends to fall to the ground.

On the new translation:

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/karl-marx-capital-new-translation/

Phil Neel writes good stuff

Yeah, it was an excellent piece

https://i.ibb.co/3YR139MM/Screenshot-2025-08-16-at-21-15-39.png

Recent appearance in Macuspana, Tabasco

zapatistas past and present in that mural, thats rad

https://www.google.com/maps/@17.7526091,-92.5896344,3a,75y,308.45h,79.45t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sbUAWM_73P8fiXn63g1qNfg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D10.551180212762446%26panoid%3DbUAWM_73P8fiXn63g1qNfg%26yaw%3D308.45181178258775!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDgxMy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

The whole street is a mural extravaganza

funny this popped up...doing a first read through of Capital now, after finishing the Grundrisse a few months ago (yes I read the Grundrisse first for some reason).

While looking up replacement brushes for my Philips Sonicare electric toothbrush I decided to look up the history of the Philips company as I've always wondered why a Dutch company appears to have an English name. I didn't find that out but instead found out that the father of the founder of the company was a first cousin of Karl Marx and that his grandfather, Lion Philips, was a major financial supporter of Marx and a close friend of his.

ryan, are you reading the new translation?

Yes I am! Never read the old penguin one but I have it. Some chapters are in a slightly different order apparently as well—since they are going off the second German edition. Taking a pause after chapter 5 and reading a bit of David Harvey’s Companion to Capital.

nice. been wondering about the new translation. I read about half of the penguin and stalled out (was part of a three-person reading group that fell apart) and have been pondering picking up the new one as a means to re-start. I liked the Harvey quite a bit though my real-deal marxist scholar friend has some problem with him that I do not fully understand