icantfindaname posted:

hey i wonder how this thread is goi-

*sees three pages of people literally saying life under Stalin was pretty good*

Let nobody say this thread isn't funny, at the very least

Friendly Tumour posted:

Yeah, but I don't think those things are the exclusive domain of Marxism.

icantfindaname posted:

hey i wonder how this thread is goi-

*sees three pages of people literally saying life under Stalin was pretty good*

Let nobody say this thread isn't funny, at the very least

Friendly Tumour posted:

Yeah, but I don't think those things are the exclusive domain of Marxism... As for it's popularity, it's no secret that Europeans are in general pretty ticked off at our political class. Doesn't mean that Marxism is making a comeback though, just that we (or the Spanish in this case) will vote for anyone who presents a viable alternative to establishment politics.

quote:

I cannot fathom how saying that is acceptable. Unironically thinking that Hitler was an ok sort of fellow is bannable, right? Well, I hope it is.

Typical Pubbie posted:

All of these things are theoretically possible in a capitalist state, though?

Typical Pubbie posted:

And while I admit that I had not heard of duchas before this thread, they sound like a desperate sales pitch to me. "Join The Communist Club, and this beautiful single-bedroom timeshare in Pine Bluff, Arkansas can be yours!"

Ardennes posted:

That is moving the goal-posts around isn't it? Your point is was it was nearly completely irreverent, when the viable alternatives will still be informed with Marxist thought to a significant degree (as the founders were professors/intellectuals pretty steeped in Marx even if Podemos isn't a classic Marxist party).

If you want to get down to will X party in the future have a Hammer and Sickle on it...probably not, but I really doubt Marx's writings aren't playing a big role in there somewhere.

Ardennes posted:

You can love Hitler all you want, it isn't bannable at all.

JeffersonClay posted:

The Marxist critique of capitalism has, I think, the following features:

1. Capitalism is inherently unstable, due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
2. In capitalism the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, which is morally wrong and also works to destabilize Capitalism.
3. The owners of capital don't do valuable work, they only enrich themselves by appropriating the value created by their employes.

Recognizing that this is an incomplete and possibly inaccurate summary, mainstream economics rejects points 1 and 3 outright, and argues about 2 quite a lot. Piketty's book "capital in the 21st century" was an attempt to prove #2 with actual historical data.

Piketty had this exchange when interviewed about his book.

IC: Can you talk a little bit about the effect of Marx on your thinking and how you came to start reading him?

TP: Marx?

IC: Yeah.

TP: I never managed really to read it. I mean I don’t know if you’ve tried to read it. Have you tried?

IC: Some of his essays, but not the economics work.

TP: The Communist Manifesto of 1848 is a short and strong piece. Das Kapital, I think, is very difficult to read and for me it was not very influential.

IC: Because your book, obviously with the title, it seemed like you were tipping your hat to him in some ways.

TP: No not at all, not at all! The big difference is that my book is a book about the history of capital. In the books of Marx there’s no data.


This is among the more charitable views of Marx that exist in mainstream Econ.

JeffersonClay posted:

The Marxist critique of capitalism has, I think, the following features:

1. Capitalism is inherently unstable, due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
2. In capitalism the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, which is morally wrong and also works to destabilize Capitalism.
3. The owners of capital don't do valuable work, they only enrich themselves by appropriating the value created by their employes.

Recognizing that this is an incomplete and possibly inaccurate summary, mainstream economics rejects points 1 and 3 outright, and argues about 2 quite a lot. Piketty's book "capital in the 21st century" was an attempt to prove #2 with actual historical data.

Piketty had this exchange when interviewed about his book.

IC: Can you talk a little bit about the effect of Marx on your thinking and how you came to start reading him?

TP: Marx?

IC: Yeah.

TP: I never managed really to read it. I mean I don’t know if you’ve tried to read it. Have you tried?

IC: Some of his essays, but not the economics work.

TP: The Communist Manifesto of 1848 is a short and strong piece. Das Kapital, I think, is very difficult to read and for me it was not very influential.

IC: Because your book, obviously with the title, it seemed like you were tipping your hat to him in some ways.

TP: No not at all, not at all! The big difference is that my book is a book about the history of capital. In the books of Marx there’s no data.


This is among the more charitable views of Marx that exist in mainstream Econ.

Friendly Tumour posted:

I cannot fathom how saying that is acceptable. Unironically thinking that Hitler was an ok sort of fellow is bannable, right? Well, I hope it is.

JeffersonClay posted:

The Marxist critique of capitalism has, I think, the following features:

1. Capitalism is inherently unstable, due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

quote:

2. In capitalism the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, which is morally wrong and also works to destabilize Capitalism.

quote:

3. The owners of capital don't do valuable work, they only enrich themselves by appropriating the value created by their employes.

Friendly Tumour posted:

the time of Marxism is in the past, and that the ideas that are going to shape the history of this century are not going to come from the Communist Manifesto.

Friendly Tumour posted:

Well I'm not terribly interested scoring goals, so uh... If you think that having a few members of the intellectual class to have read and be influenced by the writings of Marx to be an ideologically strong position for Marxism to be in, then good for you. I just don't think it's going to set the world on fire, literally or metaphorically.

I don't think it's fair to say that Podemos or it's ideological fellows in the rest of the Western world being influenced by Marx's writings makes them Marxist. It all seems to be going the way of the enlightenment, an echo of the past, inspiring the future. Nothing wrong with that mind you, but it does mean that the time of Marxism is in the past, and that the ideas that are going to shape the history of this century are not going to come from the Communist Manifesto.

Ardennes posted:

You seem to be kind of contradicting yourself a lot, you really want to say Marxism is dead but can't help yourself saying it is still influential. If not the Communist Manifesto, then maybe Capital might be the better work.

Ardennes posted:

Also, frankly to be honest, I don't really see much out there to explain what is going on in the same way. Liberalism has been left rather wanting in that sense. I mean what do you think the future is going to look like?

Friendly Tumour posted:

I think we live in a great ideological vacuum, and I for one am waiting for that new ideal that will inspire a new century of war with trepidation. Liberalism has certainly reached the end of its road. What's going to come? Who knows, but I suspect the Occupy movement will be seen as its beginning.

Friendly Tumour posted:

I think we live in a great ideological vacuum, and I for one am waiting for that new ideal that will inspire a new century of war with trepidation.

Friendly Tumour posted:

I think we live in a great ideological vacuum, and I for one am waiting for that new ideal that will inspire a new century of war with trepidation. Liberalism has certainly reached the end of its road. What's going to come? Who knows, but I suspect the Occupy movement will be seen as its beginning.

Vermain posted:

Bad news: you're already eating out of the trash can.

Obdicut posted:

What the hell are you going on about?

HorseLord posted:

I don't think a bunch of ineffectual directionless people doing a whole bunch of nothing and developing no ideas beyond "down with this sort of thing" will do much of anything.

Friendly Tumour posted:

I honestly don't want to say anything, just to understand things. No idea ever dies completely, but they do become irrelevant when new ideas come along and begin to inspire new generations. Of course, these new ideas will be inspired by the ideas of the old, but saying that makes them old ideas is disingenuous. I mean, Marx himself was inspired by both Hegel and the writers of the Enlightenment, wasn't he?


I think we live in a great ideological vacuum, and I for one am waiting for that new ideal that will inspire a new century of war with trepidation. Liberalism has certainly reached the end of its road. What's going to come? Who knows, but I suspect the Occupy movement will be seen as its beginning.

quote:

don't think a bunch of ineffectual directionless people doing a whole bunch of nothing and developing no ideas beyond "down with this sort of thing" will do much of anything.

Ardennes posted:

Yeah, but those new ideas will have to offer an explanation that makes Marx unnecessary and I haven't seen it yet, but I am not saying the future is certain either and to be honest the future of Marxist thought is still TBD.

For the vacuum to be filled you need an ideology that explains the future of free market capitalism within the context of period alongside the failure of other economic systems and the reasoning behind them.

Maybe, I can open up a .txt and figure it out.

Friendly Tumour posted:

Well I guess, but I'm not sure it's all that necessary. Ultimately all you have to do is to inspire people to work together. I mean, is Naomi Klein a Marxist? She offers a pretty convincing argument about the future of the current liberal free-market capitalism.

Vermain posted:

How do you inspire people to work together?

Vermain posted:

Can you think of potential barriers that may arise? If so, why do they arise?

Friendly Tumour posted:

Zizek is a funny guy I'll admit.


History is defined by war?

quote:

I mean, considering the history of Marxism and all the people it inspired to take up arms in the name of a better world, surely that can't be an alien concept to you?

Obdicut posted:

You say the most random poo poo. No, history has a lot more to it than war, war does not define history. You might as well say history is defined by agriculture.


It wasn't Marxism that inspired them to take up arms, but the actual horrible conditions they were in. This is why peasant revolts have always been a thing.

You kind of seem like you're just thinking out loud, and you wind up saying a lot of really incorrect or bizarre poo poo.

Friendly Tumour posted:

It seems my posting isn't up to the high standards forum user Obdicut demands

Friendly Tumour posted:

I cannot fathom how saying that is acceptable. Unironically thinking that Hitler was an ok sort of fellow is bannable, right? Well, I hope it is.

Ardennes posted:

The funny thing is for a guy who hasn't read almost any Marx, he spends some time talking about him it in his book. It almost makes you wonder if he is intentionally downplaying it quite a bit considering some of the criticism he was excepted to get. When he is having a conservation about Marx in the book without supposedly knowing anything about it, it is a bit silly.

Also, modern economists are kind of struggling to address some issues at the moment, one of the reasons Piketty wrote his book in the first place. He just has to play a little dance because he can't say the M word.

Piketty page 9 posted:

Like his predecessors, Marx totally neglected the possibility of durable technological progress and steadily increasing prodictivity, which is a force that can to some extent serve as a counterweight to the process of accumulation and concentration of private capital. He no doubt lacked the statistical data needed to refine his predictions. He probably suffered as well from having decided on his conclusions in 1848, before embarking on the research needed to justify them. Marx evidently wrote in great political fervor, which at times led him to issue hasty pronouncements from which it was difficult to escape. That is why economic theory needs to be rooted in historical sources that are as complete as possible, and in this respect Marx did not exploit all the possibiilites available to him. What is more, he devoted little thought to the question of how a society in which private capital had been totally abolished would be organized politically and economically--a complex issue if ever there was one, as shown by the tragic totalitarian experiments undertaken in states where private capital was abolished.
Despite these limitations Marx's analysis remains relevant in several respects. First, he began with an important question...and tried to answer it with the means at his disposal...Even more important, the principle of infinite accumulation that Marx proposed contains a key insight...if the rates of population and productivity growth are relatively low, then accumulated wealth naturally takes on considerable importance, especially if it grows to extreme proportions and becomes socially destabilizing.

Obdicut posted:

This isn't true, or it's phrased really weirdly. Capitalism is 'unstable' to Marx because he thinks that the proletariat will achieve mass consciousness and overthrow the bourgeoisie, just as the bourgeoisie overthrew feudalism.

quote:

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF), also known as the "law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall" (LTRPF), is a hypothesis in economics and political economy, most famously expounded by Karl Marx in Part Three of Das Kapital, Volume 3...
In his 1857 Grundrisse manuscript, Karl Marx called the tendency of the rate of profit to fall "the most important law of political economy" and sought to give a causal explanation for it, in terms of his theory of capital accumulation...Marx regarded the TRPF as proof that capitalist production could not be an everlasting form of production, since, in the end, the profit principle itself would suffer a breakdown

quote:

This isn't true, no. A capitalist can also labor. Where did you get this idea from? Is it just from the very basic, and simple idea that it is possible for an owner of capital to not do work?

HorseLord posted:

It is a pissbaby idea to try and claim that a small countries' lack of wealth compared to a bigger one is somehow the fault of being socialist, rather than, you know, being a small country.

JeffersonClay posted:

quote:

I'm not suggesting that Marxists believe a capitalist is not also capable of laboring, should he so choose. I'm suggesting they believe that the act of choosing how to invest their capital in order to maximize returns is not, itself, labor. Mainstream economists would disagree.

JeffersonClay posted:

He talks about Marx in the introduction and conclusion, including a brief summary of Marx's theories, but the 500 pages of content in the middle are Marx-Free. Quotes like this lead me to believe he is not engaging in clever posturing when he suggests he doesn't think too much of Marx, the bolded section is as close to an insult as I think Piketty is ever willing to commit to the page.

JeffersonClay posted:

If the act of investing capital is, itself, labor, then you cannot make the assumption that surplus value (profit) is produced solely by workers and expropriated by the capitalists. They might have earned it.

JeffersonClay posted:

If the act of investing capital is, itself, labor, then you cannot make the assumption that surplus value (profit) is produced solely by workers and expropriated by the capitalists. They might have earned it.

Obdicut posted:

There are a lot of interesting problems with Marxist valuation of labor, but that investment is itself labor isn't one of them, except semantically, because the decision to invest doesn't directly contribute to production.

Race Hate Kramer posted:

The real question, in my opinion, is what happens when labor itself becomes antiquated - I realize, again, this might seem extraordinary but look at how much labor was able to be basically erased from existence with the existence of primitive computer systems.

With the rate computers are zipping forward in efficiency, it's conceivable that nearly any minimum wage job could very soon (relatively speaking) be more cheaply and effectively done by a computer.

What happens when shipping is entirely automated? Human drivers (for transportation of any sort taxi, trains, planes) are immediately made irrelevant once self driving cars become the new standard (20 years pessimistically), and from there it only gets better (or worse if you are a capitalist).

My point is, soon the very concept of

Physical Labor = Value

might soon become an almost silly notion. What on earth could your average prole offer that a highly advanced and intelligent computer system couldn't do for literally 1/50th of the cost? The answer for the entirety of history has been "you need a human to physically do this job or oversee it or else it gets hosed up" but once that's not true, what chance does the average joe have?

Race Hate Kramer posted:

The real question, in my opinion, is what happens when labor itself becomes antiquated - I realize, again, this might seem extraordinary but look at how much labor was able to be basically erased from existence with the existence of primitive computer systems.

With the rate computers are zipping forward in efficiency, it's conceivable that nearly any minimum wage job could very soon (relatively speaking) be more cheaply and effectively done by a computer.

What happens when shipping is entirely automated? Human drivers (for transportation of any sort taxi, trains, planes) are immediately made irrelevant once self driving cars become the new standard (20 years pessimistically), and from there it only gets better (or worse if you are a capitalist).

My point is, soon the very concept of

Physical Labor = Value

might soon become an almost silly notion. What on earth could your average prole offer that a highly advanced and intelligent computer system couldn't do for literally 1/50th of the cost? The answer for the entirety of history has been "you need a human to physically do this job or oversee it or else it gets hosed up" but once that's not true, what chance does the average joe have?

HorseLord posted:

The act of investing capital is merely buying something, often labour itself. You cannot create value by merely buying labour power, it doesn't poof out of thin air, printing a wage slip for an employee isn't the thing that makes you rich. The thing that makes you rich is them creating a shitload of value, taking home a slice, and you keeping the rest.

Conducting a job interview or whatever is certainly work, but it's not actually creating any value. Your factory sells shoes, not job interviews.

Gantolandon posted:

This is not a very good example, because conducting a job interview is actually productive - it helps you get workers able to produce shoes. You participate in the process of making something valuable. The main point is that the owner doesn't even have to do that to get their money. They can hire managers, recruiters and lawyers to make decisions for them and still get the lion's share of the profit.

Obdicut posted:

It'll be pretty awesome, actually, unless people are assholes about it.
Sadly, they're probably going to be assholes about it.

Friendly Tumour posted:

The obvious answer is robot marxism