He was right and you are wrong.
He was right and you are wrong
Nathan Foster
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Xavier Diaz
About what?
Evan Green
In capitalist society, creative activity takes the form of commodity production, namely production of marketable goods, and the results of human activity take the form of commodities. Marketability or saleability is the universal characteristic of all practical activity and all products. The products of human activity which are necessary for survival have the form of saleable goods: they are only available in exchange for money. And money is only available in exchange for commodities. If a large number of men accept the legitimacy of these conventions, if they accept the convention that commodities are a prerequisite for money, and that money is a prerequisite for survival, then they find themselves locked into a vicious circle. Since they have no commodities, their only exit from this circle is to regard themselves, or parts of themselves, as commodities. And this is, in fact, the peculiar "solution" which men impose on themselves in the face of specific material and historical conditions. They do not exchange their bodies or parts of their bodies for money. They exchange the creative content of their lives, their practical daily activity, for money.
As soon as men accept money as an equivalent for life, the sale of living activity becomes a condition for their physical and social survival. Life is exchanged for survival. Creation and production come to mean sold activity. A man's activity is "productive," useful to society, only when it is sold activity. And the man himself is a productive member of society only if the activities of his daily life are sold activities. As soon as people accept the terms of this exchange, daily activity takes the form of universal prostitution.
The sold creative power, or sold daily activity, takes the form of labor; labor is a historically specific form of human activity; labor is abstract activity which has only one property; it is marketable; it can be sold for a given quantity of money; labor is indifferent activity; indifferent to the particular task performed and indifferent to the particular subject to which the task is directed. Digging, printing and carving are different activities, but all three are labor in capitalist society; labor is simply "earning money." Living activity which takes the form of labor is a means to earn money. Life becomes a means of survival.
Oliver Edwards
marxism is useful as a form of analysis but lacks real mobilising potential in a postmodern political landscape that is based on identity politics. modern day left wing 'Marxists' don't differ in practice from globohomo corporate liberals
Landon Watson
*digs a hole that's worth the same as the effort an engineer spent on a skyscraper*
heh, time to collect my salary comrade, nothin personnel
Dominic Morris
How am I wrong if I agree with him?
Owen Russell
Better dead than red
Tyler Gutierrez
The sale of living activity brings about another reversal. Through sale, the labor of an individual becomes the "property" of another, it is appropriated by another, it comes under the control of another. In other words, a person's activity becomes the activity of another, the activity of its owner; it becomes alien to the person who performs it. Thus one's life, the accomplishments of an individual in the world, the difference which his life makes in the life of humanity, are not only transformed into labor, a painful condition for survival; they are transformed into alien activity, activity performed by the buyer of that labor. In capitalist society, the architects, the engineers, the laborers, are not builders; the man who buys their labor is the builder; their projects, calculations and motions are alien to them; their living activity, their accomplishments, are his.
Academic sociologists, who take the sale of labor for granted, understand this alienation of labor as a feeling: the worker's activity "appears" alien to the worker, it "seems" to be controlled by another. However, any worker can explain to the academic sociologists that the alienation is neither a feeling nor an idea in the worker's head, but a real fact about the worker's daily life. The sold activity is in fact alien to the worker; his labor is in fact controlled by its buyer.
In exchange for his sold activity, the worker gets money, the conventionally accepted means of survival in capitalist society. With this money he can buy commodities, things, but he cannot buy back his activity. This reveals a peculiar "gap" in money as the "universal equivalent." A person can sell commodities for money, and he can buy the same commodities with money. He can sell his living activity for money, but he cannot buy his living activity for money.
The things the worker buys with his wages are first of all consumer goods which enable him to survive, to reproduce his labor-power so as to be able to continue selling it. And they are spectacles, objects for passive admiration. He consumes and admires the products of human activity passively. He does not exist in the world as an active agent who transforms it. But as a helpless impotent spectator he may call this state of powerless admiration "happiness," and since labor is painful, he may desire to be "happy," namely inactive, all his life (a condition similar to being born dead). The commodities, the spectacles, consume him; he uses up living energy in passive admiration; he is consumed by things. In this sense, the more he has, the less he is. (An individual can surmount this death-in-life through marginal creative activity; but the population cannot, except by abolishing the capitalist form of practical activity, by abolishing wage-labor and thus de-alienating creative activity.)
Chase Gonzalez
Marx is wrong because all politics are identity politics and politics is downstream from culture. Leftists care little or nothing about working class issues, mostly they just side with bourgeoisie liberals on cultural issues. And if pressed, they would be forced to admit race and lgbt stuff is in fact more important to them than class. How are the real friend enemy distinctions drawn? hint: it's not ''class'' for sure
Mason Miller
this is an effect of the memefication of the world. Marx became a meme, a "big [internet, social media] mood"
actually Marx still hold explosive potency. the truth of the matter that is that a person who takes Marx seriously will lift lift weights, arm himself, form insurgent cells.
We have been farm workers, dishwashers, soldiers, waitresses.
Today we are ultras—a name we use to designate those who have been transformed by the recent crises and the sequence of riots, blockades, occupations and strikes that followed. Ultras are the segment of generation fucked that has begun to realize that the world as it presently exists in untenable.
We take the name from the football ultras of Europe and North Africa, who, despite appearing apolitical to the traditional left, played an integral role in the insurrections of 2011. This is to emphasize that we are the product of the present moment, in all its ambiguity, with no direct lineage from or allegiance to the “left” of the US or Europe. We are, very simply, the consequence of forty years bought on credit. It is on these terms that ultras can speak as “we,” despite the fact that most of us do not yet know each other. This “we” is only a beginning. Any unity that we may share will be a contingent one, repeatedly tested in fire.
This website, Ultra, is run by a small and growing association of antagonists, young, angry and disciplined. Unsatisfied with dry cynicism and desperate acting-out, we are sharpening our anger through a rigorous rethinking of what we are, where we are, and what might lie ahead. Our goal is to prepare for the future even while interrogating the limits we have already confronted in the struggles following the most recent crisis. When we sum our efforts, what were we unable to overcome? And what questions do these limits raise for us the next time we find each other in the street?
The method that we follow has a simple outline: Lift Weights, Read Marx, Tear Shit Up. This is not a prescriptive program—no one is in any position to claim that they, and they only, have found the only proper path forward. It is instead descriptive. This is, simply, what we do. But we also recognize that others in similar positions are already acting in parallel. Our outlining of this program, then, is also an attempt to link up with those engaged in kindred activity. The phrase itself is shorthand, meant not only to be taken literally, but also expanded:
Connor Brown
Lift Weights
In order to prepare for an unknown future we have to build a flexible skillset. At the core of this flexibility will be basic factors of physical and mental strength. In the same way that one does not simply train a single muscle group when lifting, the point here is not to specialize in any one field but to build multivalent capabilities on a strong and flexible foundation. Weight lifting is meditation, capable of focusing emotions, intellect and body.
Lift weights, then, means more than just strength training. It means gaining practice in skills as diverse as martial arts, graphic design and childcare. It means: challenge yourself. The gravitational pull of activism is one of the greatest dangers we face as young people who have begun to realize that everything around us is completely fucked. As soon as one starts to perceive the horrors embedded in everyday life, the “left” attempts to latch on like a parasite, rejuvenating itself with fresh blood and immobilizing its host. Lift weights means ripping out the parasite. It means rejecting this culture of weakness and refusing to become the token of someone else’s patronizing politics. Remember: Strong people are harder to kill.
Read Marx
We share the opinion that the globally dominant mode of production, which we unambiguously call capitalism, must be utterly destroyed. Only through the practical abolition of the present system can we discover a beginning.
The Marxist tradition has provided the most rigorous analysis of capitalism’s origins, laws of motion, and internal limits. This analysis is thorough, but far from total—and Marxism, in its essence, makes no claims toward totality. We refer back to Marxism in its origins and in its most innovative experiments, but do not pretend that these can be wholly severed from the internal ossification and defeat of communist practice in the 20th century. That said, we believe that the only earnest critique of the “obscure disaster” of last century’s socialist experiments must itself be communist in character.
Our project, therefore, is one of ruthless inquiry into the conditions of this present moment, which hold the only potential for its overcoming. This is the core of the Marxist method, but is by no means limited to reading the Marxist canon. Through research and direct, on-the-ground inquiry, we hope to elaborate our understanding of how the global accumulation of capital translates into local configurations of power that condition everyday life. Through debate, we aim to develop strategic hypotheses useful for the assault on these conditions and the power that governs them—hypotheses that must then be tested in riots, occupations, blockades, and other forms of attack and self-reproduction that we cannot yet foresee.
Carson Morris
>marxism is useful as a form of analysis
is it really?
marxist economics has only produced fringe economic theories that nobody takes seriously.
Luke Taylor
He was right about the Jews I guess
Benjamin Bell
He might have had an accurate critique of capitalism in his time.
But IRL Marxism was a giant blunder
Juan Nguyen
>marxist economics
Read Marx
Gavin Davis
Are you saying marx didnt intend for his philosophy to be treated as an economic theory with falsifiable predictions?
Maybe you should read marx.
Cameron Rivera
Strategically speaking it is wiser to focus on creating right wing religious or racial communities in order to survive the atomising drift of modernity. the farther left you go the more inane psychodrama you can expect. Identity politics is more natural and human than marx autism. Even most leftists will agree that it is impossible to come to an understanding between different cultures/races, so the logical choice is to reject liberal ideas altogether and to return to ancestral lifeways and tribalism
Christian Wilson
Yeah but that’s where Mark Fisher and acid communism comes in. We’ve got a lot more history of rebellion and mobilization to build on now than Marx did and acid communism realizes the potential of these past movements, what we can learn, and what we can bring to the table
Eli Ward
He's a marxist he doesn't know what he's talking abut
Chase Kelly
"Economy" is a political category
>Any thorough exploration of the police must begin in ancient Greece with the oikos. We have already discussed the nature of the Greek householder’s order in an earlier section: the householder proves himself equal and thus capable of participating in politics by managing the objects in his household in an orderly fashion. Of those objects in need of management, Aristotle writes, “some are living, others lifeless.” The household is best defined as a tautology (“the household is everything being managed by the householder”) since the question of the household is not about origins, truth, or meaning, but power and functional relationships. The principles of the Roman household were virtually identical. The paterfamilias was the head of his household, the familia, which the second century jurist Ulpian defined as those persons and things who by nature or by convention are subject to the patria potestas, the power of the father. Interestingly, the paterfamilias, the father, was himself not a member of the familia, since he could not be subject to his own art of management. Despite that, the interest of the householder was said to be the interest of the household in general, so he stood both in and outside of his household.
when marx analyzed the economy is analyzed the way the slaves of the house hold are managed by the political class.
you think of "economy" as something neutral, "objective" but in fact all economy is POLITICAL economy.
Brandon Reyes
you cant say of Marx that he was just another economists with a "better" model to run society. its not like Adam Smith offered a model then marx came and said he has a better one.
Economy=management of slaves by the household owner. Marx wasn't about offering a model by which to manage slaves "better". he was about analyzing how the slaves are managed and then propagating for the slaves to rise up and destroy the householder house, meaning destroy the Economy.
Luis Taylor
>Marx's philosophy
read Marx
Tyler Green
"communism" marks that movement that destroys the economy
Carter Nelson
He was right and I am right since I agree with him on the basics of Marxism.
Brody Morris
i liked his works (best being the german ideology and worst being the manifesto) but some of his ideas are bad, especially the stuff related to authoritarianism, the dictatorship of the proletariat and calling your theory "scientific".
also his writing is shit. he explains for waaay too long that you forget what he was talking about in the first place
Joseph Clark
marxist theory is lacking in substance, it is a critique of the industrial system in its capitalist form but can't tell us how to run a complex human structure through non economic means. Look at the USSR or China, or any historical application of marxist ideas for that matter. you just get a slightly different sort of machine society
Jonathan Walker
USSR and China were industrial capitalist (with largely backwards pre-capitalist agriculture). Marxist critique applies to them very well.
Ryan Brown
see, most leftists will agree with me that identitarian differences are ontological and impossible to resolve and even trying to resolve them is not desirable.
Christian Walker
He did offer a model.
For example he wrote about the tendency if the rate of profit to fall and based on his model, marxist economists should be able to predict the rate of profit.
Levi Peterson
you're are absolutely right that capitalism has created a universe of it own. buy you still thinking in terms of needing to "run" (mange) "a complex human structure"
>Destitution makes it possible to rethink what we mean by revolution. The traditional revolutionary program involved a reclaiming of the world, an expropriation of the expropriators, a violent appropriation of that which is ours, but which we have been deprived of. But here’s the problem: capital has taken hold of every detail and every dimension of existence. It has created a world in its image. From being an exploitation of the existing forms of life, it has transformed itself into a total universe. It has configured, equipped, and made desirable the ways of speaking, thinking, eating, working and vacationing, of obeying and rebelling, that suit its purpose. In doing so, it has reduced to very little the share of things in this world that one might want to reappropriate. Who would wish to reappropriate nuclear power plants, Amazons warehouses, the expressways, ad agencies, high-speed trains, Dassault, La Defense business complex, auditing firms, nanotechnologies, supermarkets and their poisonous merchandise? Who imagines a people’s takeover of industrial farming operations where a single man plows 400 hectares of eroded ground at the wheel of his megatractor piloted via satellite? No one with any sense.
>So the revolutionary gesture no longer consists in a simple violent appropriation of this world; it divides into two. On the one hand, there are worlds to be made, forms of life made to grow apart from what reigns, including by salvaging what can be salvaged from the present state of things, and on the other, there is the imperative to attack, to simply destroy the world of capital. .
to "run" a "society" you need to be outside that reality. whenever you talk about the need to run/manage people to are placing yourselves outside the people.
what is the "economy"? its a house-hold, the wold "economy" is composed of to words "oikos" (a household) and "nomos" which means Law or Norms.
whenever a person speaks of the economy hes in fact talking about the "silence" of managing man, thereby placing himself outside or above them. economy is the science or art of managing plantations like in the old south.
belliresearchinstitute.com
Andrew Watson
but that was him descriptive gesture not an inscription one. he pointed out the faults withing the system.
actually we was perfectly right about the falling rates of profit.
youtube.com
37:11
Daniel Wright
science not silence
Jaxson Brown
the radical left as it exists today is powerless because it is the ultimate product of the system, the ultimate expression of it's individualist, atomised, secular consumer values. these are universally dysfunctional and neurotic people, they are not the wretched of the earth or working class tuffs, but educated would be elites, usually from a comfortable middle class background. elites who have abjured their moral responsibility, instead opting for radical chic, clout chasing and adolescent transgression.
Jose Gomez
check out this video about marxism by the largest marxist organisation in america. the soviet union is dead, organised labour couldn't cope with the post fordist economy, so it turns out the real road to communism involves making everyone gay.
youtube.com
Charles Watson
>He did offer a model.
no he didn't
sinistra.net
>DSA
>Marxist
-4/10
Lincoln Collins
I recall you copy pasting the exact same post yesterday as well. Fuck off, redditor.
Xavier Jenkins
>Criticizes economics and uses economics to show how socialism was 'inevitable' and capitalism full of inherent contradictions
>economists then criticize this and eventually deem Marx to be outdated
>"Hurr, marx wasn't an economist, you cant criticize him as one"
Jackson Bailey
amazin
Mason Martin
>Criticizes economics
yes
>and uses economics
no, he criticized the discipline and rejected it as a whole in favour of communist struggle
Robert Stewart
>He didn't use economics
Tendency of rate of profit to fall is an economic statement. It exists entirely within the realm of economics and can therefore be criticized from an economic standpoint. It's also one of the most important arguments that Marx produces for his 'inevitability' of capitalist collapse, and it's been criticized heavily.
And this isn't even considering the fact that doing away with economics (as in, doing away with the allocation of resources) is futile and will only lead to horribly inefficient planned economies, which is ultimately what they ended up with.
Elijah Miller
>doing away with economics (as in, doing away with the allocation of resources)
so, if I reallocate a fart from inside my ass to your mom's mouth, I'm doing economics? fascinating stuff
fucking retard
Carson Thompson
No, but if you want to feed 7 billion people, you're doing economics. I know commies tend to be completely economically illiterate, but you should at least know what economics itself is.
Dylan Morales
Smart person who disagrees with Marx
Dumb person who disagrees with Marx
At least we agree that Marx was not completely correct, which some Marxist purists would not go so far as to say :3
Alexander Brown
>belliresearchinstitute.com
muh podcast only talks about toxic masculinity, 'self care' and how sex workers are yaas kweens who deserve your hard earned money because fuck the patriarchy.
lmao they are not even pretending to be in any way different from the rest of the narcissistic white liberals and atomised consumers anymore, trying to sell their consumer lifestyle fads as revolutionary. The only difference between you people and bugmen sillicon valley libertarians is you somehow manage to be even more obnoxious.
Owen Sanchez
He's generally right, but he's wrong about the working class. They're slugs with no revolutionary potential. They deserve their fate.
Easton Hughes
blacks and jews
William Kelly
based and voltaire pilled, why the hell would anybody think that just because workers have it bad, it's somebody else's fault? if not the bougies or kings, then somebody else, or even just nature. they can't be happy. there is no scenario in which people who get trolled into bad jobs, or new religious movements, or anything else today, would ever be masters of themselves. there is no class struggle: there is the struggle of the lowly human and a few who decide not to struggle
Jose Powell
well the only working class people in the us are rednecks and mexicans and they don't want blue haired trannies telling them to check their privilege.
So no they're not to blame, leftist are.
Christopher Ortiz
what did he mean by this
Jose Gomez
how can something so left be so right?
Christopher Wilson
Sounds like ideology rather than science comrade
Carson Wilson
we need a working class revolt. but against the lgbtqia-marxist elite
Jonathan Bennett
hahahaha have you traveled forward in time from the cold war ideological struggle? The soviet union turned out to be bad, capitalism = bad thing thus soviet union = capitalism! Why don't you people invent a new
-ism for control economies
Henry Brown
Marxism have nothing to do with communism?
Bentley Wilson
it will still be shit. day 1 after you kill the californians, some nigger comes along and starts killing you over smaller differences. this literally already happened over 200 years ago in france and is where the terms "left/right wing" come from.
Oliver Hill
has there ever been even a single good revolution?
Grayson Mitchell
the reasons why the USSR was capitalist are present in Marx's theory of capitalism, so no, I haven't traveled forward in time. you probably have though, because given the flynn effect people born in the last 50 years just can't possibly be this retarded
Landon Wood
the soviet union had no markets so it was not capitalist.
It wasn't democratic but had it been democratic it would have failed even faster than it did.
Ian Johnson
no. it happened again in russia, and elsewhere in europe, and in asia, and in south america, and then again; literally every fucking time, WORKERS RISE UP = dude this is cool for exactly one second then some fractious Other creates a bunch of liveleak video material out of your guts
left, right, it don't matter, in every single case the nations involved would have been better off being cucks to their grievances because when they tried to fight the situation got a million times worse, both top down and from their own fellows
it's almost like *hits pipe* normies are apt for every yoke
Kayden Lewis
>the soviet union had no markets
how about you read a book before posting you fucking moron? any economic history of the ussr will do
>It wasn't democratic
irrelevant here
Landon Thompson
I mean it didn't have a stock market
Michael Wright
capitalist production doesn't require a stock market
Christopher Butler
>materialism governs the laws of human history
>Contemporary reviewers of Capital already accuse him of foregoing human agency and contingency and harboring a reductive deterministic vision of history
>"w-well of course humans can decide the course of history, it's just that the material base is more important. Yeah i know that this basically means the base is useless because humans can decide to go against it, but pls just go with it"
Sad!
Jonathan Gray
He was left and you are wrong.
Lincoln Ortiz
another dumb retard, just look at the absolute state of this board
Evan Powell
>No please, dont expose my prophet!
Marx and Engels were full of heel-turns, caveats, and ad-hoc justifications that ultimately served to prove a thesis with no scientific value.
Jaxson Morales
what would be an example of socialist production?
It is my understanding that you need capital in order for there to be production of any kind.
I mean yeah you could have a society with no production but it would just slowly decay.
Thomas Mitchell
>liberal
>shitposting this word in every thread for no real reason
Retard.
Xavier Cooper
I saw this thread when it had 0 replies. Just couldn't pass it up could you? Shame on you.
Easton Ross
Give me one good reason why we shouldnt kill Jeff Bezos.
Gavin Reed
A state that enforces agricultural collectivism and "voluntarism" in labor is capitalist according to Marx? How did Bukharin and Trotsky not see this! They must have missed that passage where is it?
I agree it may = bad thing but surely some new
-ism could be formulated to describe a state created by sincere marxists rather than recycle capitalism after all that may lead the layman to to assume the USSR wasn't lead by a communist party!
Ethan Garcia
things won't get better but I still can't think of one
Owen Rodriguez
>what would be an example of socialist production?
Labour is co-operative, means of production are owned in common, the product is directly appropriated by a central social organ, then it's distributed from this center: part for consumption, part for further production, part for insurance.
>It is my understanding that you need capital in order for there to be production of any kind.
Because you have a fetishistic understanding of what constitutes capital. Something only becomes capital once it acquires exchange value and the social arrangement is such that this something can be employed in extracting more exchange value from people's labour.
>Modern economists deride the simple-mindedness of the monetary system when it responds to the question: What is money? with the answer: gold and silver are money. But these self-same economists do not blush to respond to the question: What is capital? with the reply: Capital is cotton. Yet this is what they do when they declare that the materials and means of labour, the means of production or products that serve in the creation of new products, in short, all the material conditions of labour are capital by their very nature, and that they are capital because, and to the extent that, they particiapte in the labour process by virtue of their physical qualities as use-values. It is in order if others add to their list: Capital is meat and bread, for even though the capitalist purchases labour-power with money, this money in fact only represents bread, meat and, in short, all the means of susbsistence of the worker.... Under certain circumstances a chair with four legs and a velvet covering may be used as a throne. But this same chair, a thing for sitting on, does not become a throne by virtue of its use-value.
>A state that enforces agricultural collectivism and "voluntarism" in labor is capitalist according to Marx?
Kolkhozes sold their produce on an open market for profit. They were capitalist, but barely, because of the low scale and overall backwardness.
You should just read a minimum amount of Marx and USSR economic history before posting about them. Otherwise it's a waste of time on everybody's part.
If you're just baiting to be spoon-fed then tough luck because I'm going to bed. Maybe you'll find someone else.
Jose Cooper
An by "barely capitalist" I of course mean not "barely capitalism anymore, almost socialism" but "barely even capitalism, more like pre-capitalist communal agriculture"
Josiah Davis
Wait I think I remember now.
according to karl marx capital=means of production+labor
So if the means of production were owned in common it would still require capital.
Let's say a worker works in a farm.
The means of production would be the tractor.
If they wanted another tractor they would have to exchange labor in order to get the new tractor.
Bentley Turner
>according to karl marx capital=means of production+labor
Only if capitalist relations of production are present, that is only if the means of labour have exchange value and can absorb labour, yielding products of a higher exchange value than the value of used up means of production, raw materials, and wages. But there's no exchange value in socialism, and therefore no value that begets value, i.e. capital. Good night.
Nicholas Jones
I see a state capitalist by your definition if even one free exchange takes place in it between individuals? However there were periods in soviet history when even this was not the case.
Lets agree that when Stalin and Preobrazhensky argued for price fixing and liquidating kulaks and aggressively implemented this between 1928-30 the USSR was not capitalist even by your very broad definition. What -ism is this?
Parker Sullivan
>thinks marx believed that all labor is the same
Nicholas Walker
i think cuba is the closest thing to actual marxism existing today and it sucks.
Marxism is a receipe for stagnation.
Maybe itd be suited for Japan but in the US theres still a lot of things that need to be built and things to be done.
Luis Gonzalez
>I don't understand economics