• Parsani [love/loves, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    Marxism is a way to view the world that has like 7 books written on it

    data-laughing

    Marx had a fundamental misunderstanding in that the cost of something doesn’t affect its end value. It may affect its price, but value isn’t the same thing as price either.

    Hence most left wing Marxist-based economies sucking.

    This is trivial to demonstrate; look at the Juicero. Tons of labor and materials poured into making one (hence a high cost) which required setting a high price to recoup… but very little value. Nobody bought the damn things, so it’s high price did not match it’s value. Other examples are industrial settings, where custom fixtures/molds can reach 6 digit $ price tags during production runs. Then at EOL for the project be sold off for literal pennies to scrap dealers.

    Lmao, Marx famously failed to consider socially useless labor time and fixed capital investment.

    • btbt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      One failed product clearly disproves everything Marx ever wrote, communism has never been more finished

    • TerminalEncounter [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      Gotta love showing an example of how capitalism failed means communism didn’t work lmao. Yeah there might be people starving and juiceros being created and failing but that definitely doesn’t have to do with the distribution of goods based on profit instead of need. Nope.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Marxism is a way to view the world that has like 7 books written on it

      Aside from that Marx and Engels personally wrote more than this, it’s always insightful how they don’t just not know about communism and don’t know that there’s a lot they don’t know, but also actively suppose there is almost nothing to know even according to communists

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      This person pulls a bait and switch in the worst way. They mention the failures of socialist economies, then goes on to describe the Juicero, which as a failure of the excesses of venture capital.

      In fact if I remember right, a Chinese company copied the design of the Juicero, scrapped the useless parts like the QR reader and the wifi, and sold it for less than $100. They probably made a profit. Chalk up a win for socialism I guess.

    • TraumaDumpling@hexbear.net
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      LMFAO these people think gold and diamonds just spawn on the surface like Monster Hunter resource gathering points and all you have to do is pick them up

      what is mining? sounds like Tankie Misinformation to me lol

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      I wonder if there’s some sort of monopoly on diamonds artificially inflating their price. Does Marx talk about supply/demand and explain that this can alter prices but not value? I wonder.

      Anyways, this person thinking it takes no time/effort to “produce” diamonds/gold is funny (esp. with the case of lab diamonds).

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      Marx does talk about precious/luxury goods in Capital volume 1 actually. If I remember right he specifically talks about pearls and paintings. But if I remember right he doesn’t define paintings as commodities, since their value can’t be reproduced through the same methods, since the value comes from the rarity associated with the artist. He says something similar about pearls too.

      But that poster is completely wrong. Gold doesn’t take labor to mine out of the ground? Diamonds don’t take labor to mine or synthesize? What

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        Literally in the first chapter of Capital Volume 1:

        “Jacob doubts whether gold has ever been paid for at its full value. This applies still more to diamonds. According to Eschwege, the total produce of the Brazilian diamond mines for the eighty years, ending in 1823, had not realised the price of one-and-a-half years’ average produce of the sugar and coffee plantations of the same country, although the diamonds cost much more labour, and therefore represented more value. With richer mines, the same quantity of labour would embody itself in more diamonds, and their value would fall. If we could succeed at a small expenditure of labour, in converting carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks.

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          I like that Marx mentions diamonds. Lab grown diamonds are around a third the price of mined diamonds, specifically because there are less people performing labor on them. I believe most of the cost of lab diamonds comes from the cutting of it, since diamonds still take specialized equipment to cut.

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            Yeah, he really mentions how diamonds would be “the price of a brick” and industrial diamonds pretty much are. But jewelry diamonds are still expensive, and the diamond industry is a great way to introduce people to Marxist concepts of value.

    • Pisha [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children’s primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

      Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

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      It feels like a weird joke. Like this is how I would do a parody of someone who refuses to read Capital. I’d make statements exactly like this, mentioning things that Marx explicitly mentioned in the first chapter as a joke.

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    Progressive left’s worldview can be roughly summarized as “America bad, capitalism bad”. It’s barely any more nuanced than the GOP electorate, whose entire philosophy seems to be “Trump good, own the libs”.

    Heh, my ideology is so much more complex. See, I believe socialism bad, white capitalist countries good.

    • Tommasi [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      Painful amounts of projection.

      Neoliberals have zero nuance. If something is designated as an enemy by the state department, everything it does in every situation is bad, and everything negative someone says about it must be true. But it’s the people who think it’s more complicated who just don’t see nuance.

    • FnordPrefect [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      blob-no-thoughts: “My house is on fire! What should we do?!”

      Commie: “Spray water on it!”

      Fascist: “Spray gasoline on it!”

      blob-no-thoughts: “Their plans are both equally simple. Clearly they both are wrong!”

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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        Neoliberals will note that, in the event of a grease fire, spraying water is actually bad. And they will use this as a point of evidence in their “Why we should defund the fire department” master’s thesis.

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      Heh, my ideology is so much more complex.

      Sort of the joke of neoliberalism. If you put out a 20,000 page white paper with the title “Socialism Bad, White Country Good” then you are correct, right up until someone issues a 21,000 page white paper that reads “DEBUNKED: Why White Country Sometimes Bad, but Socialism Even Worse Than Originally Thought”.

      Not surprising how many of these chucklefucks think AI is going to be a game-changer. After all, with a ChatBot I can produce white papers of infinite length! Try and refute that, stupid leftists. You can’t!

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      Geocentrism is more complex than heliocentrism (at least in terms of things like orbital mechanics), and yet…

      It’s like these people have never heard of Occam’s Razor

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    a lot of people that call themselves leftists just adopt “capitalism bad and culturally underdeveloped people good” as their core principle and go from there instead of reading the books

    Honestly, (aside from the racist framing) if you follow these rules you’ll probably be on the correct side of history 99% of the time

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    leftists just adopt “capitalism bad and culturally underdeveloped people good” as their core principle and go from there instead of reading the books

    This is fucking racist

    The Avatar worldview. The James Cameron one, not the good one

    Yeah sure ATLA certainly has no black and white message about the consequences of industrialism and imperialism on pre-industrial societies.

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      This exchange really exposes how disgusting liberals are

      leftists just adopt “capitalism bad and culturally underdeveloped people good” as their core principle and go from there instead of reading the books

      Lmao ghouls saying the quiet part out loud be less racist loser

      Do you like lgbt rights,freedom of speech,rights for women? All of these are signs of an objectively more developed culture.cultures that don’t have these are worse for their own people. Or do you think every cultural practice holds equal value? smuglord

      Using LGBT+ rights and women’s rights as a racist cudgel to justify neoliberal economic policy and imperialism, which directly contributes to these nation’s reactionary governments (and in many cases the imperialists fund and back reactionaries that PROMOTE these discriminatory governments). This is also ignoring all of the reactionary policies in the imperial core that are enacted by their favourite neoliberal politicians. These shitstains have no right to concern troll or virtue signal over minority rights and women’s rights when they don’t actually care about it.

      Liberals are deeply unserious.

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        Using LGBT+ rights and women’s rights as a racist cudgel to justify neoliberal economic policy and imperialism, which directly contributes to these nation’s reactionary governments (and in many cases the imperialists fund and back reactionaries that PROMOTE these discriminatory governments). This is also ignoring all of the reactionary policies in the imperial core that are enacted by their favourite neoliberal politicians. These shitstains have no right to concern troll or virtue signal over minority rights and women’s rights when they don’t actually care about it.

        It has just struck me that this is the same tactic Israel uses with antisemitism. It’s self-reinforcing because it causes antisemitism in foreign countries, which causes jews to support Israel because of the antisemitism.

        The LGBT and women’s rights cudgel the west uses to advance economic domination and power causes reactionary anti-lgbt behaviour in foreign countries, and in turn that homophobia and misogyny causes LGBT and women’s rights people to even more strongly support the west.

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            The difficulty here is discussing it without also looking like you’re anti-lgbt. Which is similar to the difficulty that previously existed with discussing zionism without also looking like you’re antisemitic. The immediate assumption most people go to is that you’re a raging homophobe.

            • ashinadash [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              Can I get a “hell yeah” for nato bootlickers calling the ace trans lesbian a homophobe??? Real shit!

              I always open with “I do not want imperialists using the rights they won’t even give me as a cudgel against the global south”

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                We have the same shit going on as the jewish anti-zionists. This is actually pretty revelatory for me, I had not connected these things before but it’s so similar.

                EDIT: Like holy fuck there’s a reason we see “but they throw gays off rooftops” come up so often when it comes to palestine too. Same fucking thing. It even gets used FOR zionism itself.

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                  I look forward to your future posting about this, it’s a very interesting connection! False consciousness bears some commonality across seemingly-disparate cases, turns out.

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        lgbt rights, freedom of speech, rights for women

        observing the way things are going in the west I doubt those rights will actually remain in place for long, and western libs will tell affected groups it’s their fault that they didn’t vote hard enough as libs do nothing or actively make things worse

        second one never existed, just ask any actual journalist brave enough to defy mainstream narratives or publish information detrimental to US interests

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        The liberals think legal outcomes are the result of some nebulous idea of cultural practice!farquaad-point Every right we temporarily enjoy in capitalist countries was achieved by people chucking bombs or by threat of same. Do you enjoy working less than 21 hours a day and being paid in legal tender instead of company funbux? Then thank my ideological forebears for their service you fucking dweebs.

    • TheGenderWitch [she/her, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      leftists just adopt “capitalism bad and culturally underdeveloped people good” as their core principle and go from there instead of reading the books

      oh my god they said the quiet part out loud holy shit they’re being racist as fuck

    • CannotSleep420
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      They’re talking about the blue alien avatar, not the last airbender.

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        I think their point is that both Avatars have anti-imperialist messaging, so singling one out as “the good one” betrays media illiteracy.

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      If you go further down the thread, he is arguing back and forth with someone, and is basically proposing historical racism as an alternative to historical materialism.

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    So many comments claiming marx is wrong because they don’t understand what the “value” is in LTV. Some of them are literally saying he’s wrong because he doesn’t understand value is different to price which is lol

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    I’m getting flashbacks to my mandatory Econ 101 course where the professor once asked me to leave the room because I had actually read Marx and could quote his actual words and thus got into a heated argument over what Communism was

    I wasn’t in trouble, but I was very much on the verge of throwing my backpack at a guy who kept insisting that welfare was communist

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    “You say Cuba is a democracy, but it’s been rated 3/10 burgers by the Freedom Burger Institute (partially funded by the CIA, partially funded by the American Christofascist caucus), check out this Wikipedia page.”

    no-choice

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    I’ll take “Ill-advised things to say at an independent bookstore” for 500, Alex

    Marxism is a way to view the world that has like 7 books written on it

    buzzer
    What is “words spoken immediately prior to getting crushed to death under a pile of books”?

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    I only read twenty pages of the first kapital.doesn’t the theory of value say that an item’s worth is increased by the amount of effort or time put into creating it?

    Then there are posters agreeing with that definition. Oh my god, these people haven’t read anything. Marx defines socially necessary labor time in chapter one, which this person claims to have read.

    Culturally underdeveloped

    Liberals breaking new grounds in ways to say racist things while using academic sounding jargon. Fuck these people. They think they’re so culturally advanced and yet neoliberalism and the west are the biggest enablers of genocide worldwide. Apparently drone strikes are a feature of culturally advanced people

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      Liberals breaking new grounds in ways to say racist things while using academic sounding jargon.

      It’s funny how much it’s just a synonym for “civilized” no matter how you read it, but anyone would rightly recognize “civilized” in this context to be a blatantly racist term

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    boiled down to “you worked on a thing, so you deserve the entire revenue of that thing”, which obviously isn’t true. Like, if your employer lends you a hammer for free, shouldn’t he be entilted to some of the profits that the hammer creates?

    Good god the layers on this

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      I like to hit people with some variation of:

      A couple years ago I hired a guy to patch my roof. Now I’m selling my house. How much of the proceeds should I give him?

      People start twisting themselves in knots real fast with that example. They generally understand and accept home ownership even if they can’t afford it but they simply can NOT empathize with equity holders otherwise.

      Did you not pay your roofer wtf

  • Wheaties [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    Kapital is perfectly coherent to the extent that any early-to-mid-19th century economic treatise was. Economics was far less scientific than it is today and is both written very differently and comes to very different conclusions than Marx, which makes Kapital painful to read today

    Even scholars whose theories aged far better like Darwin and Newton are similarly unreadable [emphasis mine]

    :susie-laugh:

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      It is truly incredible that these people have not only not read Marx, but also not read any Adam Smith or David Ricardo (even though they likely view Adam Smith as their ‘more scientifically correct ancestor like Newton or Darwin’), so they have absolutely no conception that Marx is literally just expanding on both Smith and Ricardo’s theories and works, testing their claims with newly available statistical economic data (that was collected because of initiatives by Smith and Ricardo but never actually followed up on because that is never how economic planning actually works in western democracies, nobody actually looks at real economic statistics outside of academia or bureaucratic functionaries, they simply publish them when they are in their favor) and expanding on their claims, taking them to their logical conclusions.

      It’s so infuriating to see them posit that something like the Labor Theory of Value is horseshit because it is from Marx when the Labor Theory of Value is not originally a Marxist claim, it is far older than that, but it was most explicitly a claim by Adam Smith that Marx then went to great lengths to provide evidence for and demonstrate how the value applied by labor affects commodity pricing of supply and demand based on it’s ‘usefulness’. AND THIS IS LITERALLY ON THE WIKIPEDIA PAGE ‘LABOR THEORY OF VALUE’.

      And that said, nowhere in Marx does he ever actually say ‘Labor Theory of Value’ because this is just his ‘Theory of Value’, which happens to center on labor because it is the only way that he was able to make sense of things like the gold inflationary crisis in Spain, or how cheap products from India could be priced despite their demand and distance (remember this is just prior to mass industrialization in Britain). From there he was able to extrapolate what was causing these events that contradicted a purely ‘supply and demand’ based system to create a model of exploitative economic relationships that actually run society, in direct contrast to the popular British utilitarian rhetoric at the time, which was about ‘providing moral value (read now as jobs) to indolent and uncultured savages’.

      As @GrouchyGrouse@hexbear.net pointed out, these neoliberals are quite literally the using the exact same appeal as those old British utilitarians, literally dressing up old unscientific and racist ideas in new clothing and attempting to pass them off as ‘more modern’ than Marxist economics.

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        Is there any chance you could provide a tl;dr on Jevons, who is mentioned in the thread? That’s the one thing they mention that I’m not familiar with (obviously I’ve heard about the “marginal revolution”, but the predditors there are demonstrating how vibes are inadequate)

        • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          It has been awhile but I will take a crack at it.

          So Jevons is the guy who first indicated the idea of Austrian economics or marginal economic theory, depending on who you ask. Jevons basically says that things are worth what people will pay for them, basically, it doesn’t matter how much labor is put into an item, what matters is the subjective value and availability of that item. Basically, what Jevons says is that ‘price is value’, a very different distinction than what had been made before and reduction of theory, (which is why it is called ‘a revolution’). And he isn’t exactly wrong, but for wrong reasons.

          For example, Jevons says that it is because of the marginally reducing utility (lessening use-value) of a singular items as there are more items that determine the items value and therefore it’s price. A man rich in diamonds but starved of water would happily exchange his diamonds for far less than the labor cost to create those diamonds, for example, because those diamonds have lessing marginal utility. However, he also posits that sometimes the more of something there is, the higher the demand actually goes because the utility has been marginalized by use (something that we can see with induced traffic, more lanes equals more traffic).

          The problem of course here, is that while that is correct, it is not a holistic example, nor does it actually address Adam Smith’s LTV. Basically, what the LTV says is that if you cannot make the price of something match the social utility value, then an activity ceases. If the diamonds cannot at least provide enough to feed, water and house the workers, then people will not mine diamonds. Basically, it is likely that people aren’t actually taking into account all the labor that it takes to get the water to the diamond guy. In the same way, when previous luxuries become available to the public, they quickly attain a social utility value, thus explaining why demand remains constant or increases despite supply increase. It is a sign of what does and does not have social utility, regardless of price.

          Edit: This can also be explained by capitalism’s need to generate profit and increasing returns, spending money to induce demand so their product attains an appearance of social utility, which is the big difference between Jevons and Marx, Marx believes that induced demand is false demands for false needs (in particular the need to generate an ever increasing profit), where true social utility needs will become apparent after the political revolution and the overthrow of capitalist domination of nature and the market, while Jevons treats all needs, induced or not, as authentic.

          I’ll have to reread some Jevons, it has been while.

          2nd Edit: I’ve been thinking for a longtime that the problem with economic theory is in it’s categories. I think that instead of ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ it should be in terms of ‘scarce and not scarce’ I know there is an ‘economics of scarcity’ but it doesn’t seem to be pushed as one of the major schools in economic theory.

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      The seven atheistically ordained high priests of Marxism huddle around the sacred texts. Only seven scrolls left, containing the sum total of their knowledge. One of the faceless grey men reaches out to unfurl a weathered papyrus scroll, as to refresh his fading memory of one of the True Precepts. As he tenderly teases it apart, the forces of time prove too much and the paper crumbles into dust, gently blowing away on the wind like smoke.

      The Labor Theory of Value is no more.

      The seven robed figures let out a wail, dissonant and useless.