Personally I think it’s silly as hell. Qualia is obviously a biological component of experience… Not some weird thing that science will never be able to put in to words.
I’ve been listening to a lot of psychology podcasts lately and for some reason people seem obsessed with the idea despite you needing to make the same logical leaps to believe it as any sort of mysticism… Maybe I am just tripping idk
I think the end result is the same if I end up just telling everyone to read Capital anyways.
I think it is hypocritical to tell someone to read something you haven’t read yourself imo, but this conversation has started circling and I’m not a strict Maoist so you do you I guess.
I read Capital (in laymen form) when i was in my teens and have internalized it into my later years. Sure I could’ve internalized it better, but “look toward some form capital” as some form of disbelief has worked for me for many years.
Googling “If Marx was correct about LTV then what prevents marketing people from getting paid” is basically Vol 2. I don’t need to have read all several volumes of Capital, for the some reason. Marx didnt have Marx when he was writing capital: for the human condition, Capital is blatantly correct. At least to myself that is true.
I concede I am too far drunk to elaborate though
BECAUSE OF CAPTALISM
gottem
just want to say i enjoyed eavesdropping on this
hope you both have a good night
Lol. Look, none of what you just said made any sense to me, but enjoy your night.
I will say one thing, correct, Marx didn’t have Marx when writing Capital. However, that doesn’t mean we have to reinvent the wheel. Stand on the shoulders of giants.
Imagine if Lenin decided to stand on the shoulder of giants instead of trying to make himself a giant. Idk seems like we can take what’s work and try to improve it.
To never imagine yourself as a giant is selling yourself short. I am just as capable as Marx, as Marx was simply describing reality.
Please tell me you are trolling.
Lenin constantly references Marx and Engles throughout his works, with most of his critiques of his opponents stemming directly from what he believed to be misinterpretations (revisions) of Marxist thought. Lenin was always, always, sure to tie his particular analysis of the material conditions within Russia back to Marx’s original observations, littering his works with direct quotations from Marx that would refute his opponents. He literally wrote one of the most comprehensive known biographies of Marx.
You don’t understand the metaphor. You can be giant while standing on the shoulders of giants. If there was ever a giant that stood on the shoulders of a giant, it was Lenin. If you want to be Lenin, then you have to read Marx.
You act as if Baudrillard, Debord, Sartre, or Beauvoir don’t literally cite Marx directly constantly. Same is obviously true for Lenin.
Marx took someone else’s Labor Theory of Value to prove his point about surplus extraction, do I need to read Adam Smith and Ricardo before I read Marx? No. They’re baked into what Marx wrote. Would I understand more if I did? Sure, that’s true for literally any damn pursuit of knowledge.
I legit don’t understand what you’re saying. I’ve read Vol 1. I’ve read various passages from the other volumes of capital, ive read critique of the gotha program, I’ve read Gundriss. I’ve done all of that and have defended Marx and Engels work to prove they did not sneak in teleology, in an academic setting.
I still think you’re missing a whole world of philosophy by thinking Marx had everything figured out. He was clearly very bad at predictive history to say the least.
And you are stubbornly saying that for some reason philosophy only starts when modernity begins. You are literally placing your trust in liberal self-selected interpretations of Vol. 2 (or hell, other Marxist interpretations, including my own, of Vol. 2) rather than reading it yourself and forming your own opinion to compare to these modern authors. You want to be a giant but all of these giants before you did every bit of reading, writing and research they could get their grubby little mitts on. That is imo, what creates a giant.
I 100% recommend that you read Adam Smith and Ricardo as well, so you can even argue with Marx on his interpretation of it. Hell, I 100% recommend that you read Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hume, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, etc. We live in an age with access to archives of knowledge Marx would have literally killed for. Excersize it.
Marx was pretty clear. It was socialism OR barbarism. If the system is rational, it will proceed towards communism and the freedom and betterment of mankind, if the system remains mired in irrationality, it will inevitably collapse under the weight of it’s own contradictions and revert back towards the feudal economy, or some other formation that values protection of accumulated wealth over the common interests of those that create it. He was also clear that without active and organized party and labor movement with the means to defend itself and the revolution, the system will never naturally bring itself towards rationality. You clearly get this if you are arguing that Marx didn’t have teleology.
Men make history, but they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing. And he was correct. If anything it was Lenin who really fucked up his analysis, thinking that if Russia fell then there would be nothing stopping Germany and the entirety of industrial Europe from becoming communist. Without a communist revolution occuring in the most industrialized nation in the world after WWII, the capitalists were able to essentially dictate the course of modern history, and we now live in an incredible state of being where two countries at war with each other can still be their greatest energy partner and provider for most of it. A fully irrational system for the betterment of humanity. And it may take another couple 100 years, but eventually, the oil will run dry, the mines will be empty, and for what? So that .001% of humanity never has to work another day in their life? To go forth and strip the light from the stars for the sake of number go up?
I’m not saying he had everything figured out, but I am saying that the principles of capital reproduction that are laid out in Capital Vol. 2 are the foundations for a real understanding of modern political-economy and you are insisting that you don’t have to read it because you are just so good at this analysis, but others should. It’s maddeningly absurd logic.
Argueably Vol. 2 is even more important than Vol. 1 because it is where he gets into the most important parts, how capital is formed, accumulates and is in-of-itself vested with power in a way that never actually existed prior to modernity (which, argueably it did, just not in the kind of concentrations that divorced it from the polity as an independent entity. Even Crassus was still a creature of Rome. But one could also argue that Marx is pretty clear about a development period being about the overall tendency in the period, not if something was 100% one thing or the other, but I digress).
Look, you can do whatever you want, read whatever you want, tell people to read whatever you want. It’s not your job to live up to my standards. You can respond however you wish, but know that I am considering this conversation finished for my own sake.
Right. Again, I don’t really know what we are disagreeing about. I acknowledge their is knowledge to be found in Vol 2. I am simply stating it isnt really that important to me right now, which is why I am posting about consciousness and trans liberation instead. I personally want to write a paper on Labor Theory of Value and the implications AI has on labor but I don’t have the time or energy to do that so I focus on more frivolous shit.
Yeah I hope to get to it someday. There is infinite to read and not infinite time. I can either learn lots of small things or deep dive into Vol 2 and probs be scratching my noggin for the next several months as I have to read supplementary works to make sense of what Marx was talking about, because that mother fucker used some very pretty language that doesn’t translate too well to English all the time.
I still don’t think Vol 2 is gonna teach me about Love like Sartre or Beauvoir…
When I say I’ve read enough Marx, what I mean is I have read enough Marx to get the gist and now possess the ability to use his works as a resource whenever I run into a question that stumps me. Basically like a Bible. I may not know everything in the Bible, but it has now transitioned from a roadblock to a stepping stone. Thats the important part.