culturally underdeveloped people
Well that’s certainly a phrase that is in no way racist
what’s all this nazism doing in my anticommunism?
when your culture is rotten to the core, it would certainly seem that other cultures are uhh unripened
Marxism is a way to view the world that has like 7 books written on it
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.
One failed product clearly disproves everything Marx ever wrote, communism has never been more finished
It’s just so silly, they are just making the mudpie argument which is dispelled in the first few pages of capital.
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.
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
marxism, famous for not having a veritable library of work
Marxism is a way to view the world that has like 7 books written on it
when you definitely understand the left
The average leftist forum debate is at least 7 books equivalent if not more. And it’ll be on something inconsequential
7 would be great. I can read 7 books to follow a forum thread. when I get a reading list with dozens of books I get overwhelmed.
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.
Are these people really that ignorant?
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
Plus the extensiveness to which they have already been mined means generally further mining operations need to go much deeper underground, making it all the more expensive. These fuckers are talking like you can just pan for gold and get by the ingot.
But that’s how Minecraft works!
Those people are deeply unserious
You have to say “those people are deeply unserious in minecraft” or it is a call to violence
Pretty sure we’ve been over this, “in minecraft” is a
ploy so they can ctrl+f easier. Mix up the videogame from time to time.Those people are deeply unserious in guilty gear: strive.
Calling for a mixup, Chipp main detected
A tweet that absolutely lives rent free in my head
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).
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
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.
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.
America bad, capitalism bad
This would make you have a correct opinion 95% of the time.
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.
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: “My house is on fire! What should we do?!”Commie: “Spray water on it!”
Fascist: “Spray gasoline on it!”
: “Their plans are both equally simple. Clearly they both are wrong!”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.
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!
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
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
“culturally underdeveloped” has got to be the most liberal way of saying something racist I’ve ever heard. They might as well just come out and say savages or barbarians. How does this framework even operate? The USA is supposedly culturally developed? The only country that has dropped atom bombs on civilians and has the largest prison population? Ok.
Cultural Development Nukes
“culturally underdeveloped” has got to be the most liberal way of saying something racist I’ve ever heard.
It’s basically the same as 19th century liberal racism. White Man’s Burden and so on
culturally undeveloped people
My
is emitting the Kill Bill sirenAnd of course, then they immediately hide behind LGBT and women’s rights when someone says “hey, that sounds a little racist”
Their predecessors were perfectly happy to criminalize homosexuality and chemically castrate Alan Turing, all while saying “well at least we don’t practice ritual cannibalism like those foreign savages.”
Meanwhile THEIR predecessors were ritually grinding up and snorting mummies at parties waited on by veritable slaves. It’s bullshit excuses and racism all the way down. It always just boils down to “well at least we don’t do (thing we were doing quite recently until better people forcibly stopped us)”.
Not just that, go back further and Europe had a centuries long fad of using ground up human skulls and other body parts as medicine, the mummies were just the tail end of it. Maybe they’ll even bring it back to treat the King’s prostate so he can die stuffed full of dead people like the last King Charles did.
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“Cultural Development” is when capitalist think tanks place you high on their country rankings.
underdeveloped
its like that viral video about north korea, where the lady explains that if you just assume the US state department is lying you end up on the right side of history most times
That’s the line that I couldn’t stop staring at… Like, even in neolib brain world that is some thinly veiled racism.
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.
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?
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.
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.
We call it “Homonationalism” and it is the absolute slimiest tactic
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.
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”
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.
Yup! Zionists fuckin LOVE their homonationalism, look up Brand Israel and bring a puke bucket. Also watch Pride Denied: Homonationalism & The Future of Queer Politics!
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.
i’m a removed, it’s easy for me. the correct response to “hm so you hate the LGBT Community??” is “shut the fuck up imperialist, if a queer joins the US army they should be hanged for treason.”
Holy shit we need a “not in our name” movement for lgbt people.
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Yep, exactly
Do you like lgbt rights,freedom of speech,rights for women? All of these are signs of an objectively more developed culture.
I fucking hate this type of guy
fReEdOm Of SpEeCh you massacre people for opposing war
The liberals think legal outcomes are the result of some nebulous idea of cultural practice!
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.
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
okay, i’ve come around, Avatar is a revolutionary text. sometimes our enemies can recognize a weapon that is hidden to us.
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.
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”?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
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
i swear i saw a comment that said this is the exact thing posters on that subreddit do; it’s something to see it in action…
It’s super confusing because he covers this really really clearly in his initial definitions, which are like… On the first section, first page depending on your book.
Bold of you to assume they’d do something many commies struggle to do themselves; read theory
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it goes without saying that they haven’t read Marx. the really stunning part is that they believe they can use their perfect philosophical minds to deduce what marx wrote from the axiom that marxists are always wrong.
“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.”
Socially progressive policies that the people voted on directly.
Not just voted on, but helped directly write through their participation in the thousands of local meetings by which the family code was formed as a text. This is a kind of strong democratic participation that liberals seem literally incapable of imagining
that’s mob rule!
a country can be both an oppressive autocracy and have socially progressive policies
“Please help, my country is oppressing me into treating inferior people as equals!”
“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.”
We don’t even have to go there, just looking at the name, it seems to rank how “free” the market is, because that’s all that matters to them libs. Democracy is when invisible hands or something.
Democracy is when you can buy and sell things but especially fun little treats and goodies and yum yums so tasty I LOVE FREEDOM
Measuring how free the market is while imposing massive sanctions on the country very cool
Honestly an autocracy with progressive values would probably do a better job of standing up to the heritage foundation at al. than whatever is going on here so that does sound like an improvement
[lenin quote]
which lenin quote?
Yep, that’s the one.
A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on Teddit and Libreddit, which are Reddit frontends that protect your privacy.
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
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
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
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
Even scholars whose theories aged far better like Darwin and Newton are similarly unreadable
yeah those guys have been proved wrong a lot haven’t they
this is apparently the background picture to /r/neoliberal?
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Where’s the Pinochet head? All the users on that sub want to be him.
Newtonian physics is famously the most accurate and developed physics model for objects of all sizes and in all situations.
The argument goes “and other employees are also paid”
But this isn’t what Marx actually argues, they are arguing against an insipid strawman
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:
Watching neoliberal apologists try to disprove Marx is like me trying to disprove Darwin by citing a medieval bestiary
Does Darwin account for a serpent hatching from a hen’s egg?
Darwin never consindered the Esquilax
Darwin BTFO
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.
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)
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.
Marxism is a way to view the world that has like 7 books written on it
The theory-reader has logged on.
Going to my local library and asking for every book and journal on Marxism since there’s only 7 of them
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.
