pull your head out of your ass and keep it simple Anonymous 11-06-23 02:06:44 No. 14131 [View All]
the way i explain the labor to people is very simple. I cut straight to the chase.> 2 If you pay them exactly what their work is worth, you don’t make any money, your business won’t grow, and you’ll get bought out by some asshole who pays workers less. > 3 If you pay a worker more than their work is worth, you’re losing money, your business will shrink, and you’ll go out of business. > 4 the problem is the system, because the way the system is set up, workers have to beg for a job from people who own the places we work at, and the bosses only give the job to the lowest bidder, the people willing to do the most in exchange for the least in return. > 5 everybody who can't get a job has to keep looking for a job until they get so desperate they start selling themselves for less and less > 6 even with how little they pay us they think it's too much. so they constantly look for ways to make more money and pay less money. > 7 they send our jobs overseas to where the labor is cheaper, and they want us to blame the people overseas even though they're the ones sending the jobs off and calling themselves job creators while they do it > 8 they hire a bunch of overeducated nerds to make machines and programs to do our jobs for us, so they can fire us, and then they take credit for what those nerds make > 9 they give the jobs to people who just got here and are usually running away from some fucked up shit like war and are therefore more desperate than even the average schmuck here is > 10 despite all this shit they do to get rid of us or make us work for less money, they still need to sell the stuff they make, and if everyone's too poor to buy that shit, then they gotta lower the price > 11 the faster they make stuff, the cheaper that stuff is because less work goes into makin it, and money is just a piece of paper that says some work got done "oh but this is stuff marx says!" yeah but he says it real fancy and takes a long time. keep it simple stupid.
122 posts and 15 image replies omitted. Anonymous 13-06-23 22:24:55 No. 17988
>>14206 > why would it be "modernised" A rewrite of capital with modern examples would actually be interesting and useful. One of the most common dismissals I hear of Marx from liberals and social democrats, and so forth, is that Marx's analysis of Capital was accurate to the time/place in which he was writing, but not now. They basically try to pretend it's all just Victorian England and that things have reformed to be better. Obviously that's not true but it would be helpful to draw on contemporary data to make Marx's points again. Marx obviously draws on a lot of data.
I remember long sections of Volume 1 drawing from English factory data from the 1840s and 1850s, talking about the devastating conditions that factory workers in England experienced, especially children. But lately I see conditions in the USA for example declining to that level. Children in slaughterhouses and so forth. Also Marx's language is often erudite and literary and very of its time. It can be confusing or alienating to modern readers who aren't used to reading things from the 1800s. The English language has changed a lot since then.
fundamentally, no, it is still about workers selling their labor power as a commodity to a capitalist who buys that labor power for less than it is worth, and pockets and/or reinvests the surplus. The circuits of capital Marx identified are still the same. But the particulars have changed. The geopolitics have changed. The tricks the bourgeoisie use to prevent class consciousness from emerging and to mask class antagonism. have gotten more elaborate. I think a re-write of Capital would highlight these changes to the
particulars, or at the very least mention them in a foreword or afterword. Marx himself while he was still alive released a second edition of Capital volume 1 that was different in its particulars than the 1st edition.
As Marx notes in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Marx's different editions of Capital reflect his reworking of published material especially in the presentation of the work particularly on the theory of value.
And then of course there is the matter that Capital is an unfinished work. Kautsky obviously released Volume 4, but that is controversial for obvious reasons. Perhaps we need a Marx in our age to finish what he died doing?
Anonymous 17-06-23 01:03:00 No. 18028
>>18022 >people so horrified at the prospect of reading that they have to hide behind imaginary illiterate workers (because all workers are retarded, apparently everyone you have accused of this ITT has denied that they are saying this over and over again and yet you
keep bringing this assertion to the table because the possibility of the conversation
being about anything else is an
affront to your perception. Anonymous 17-06-23 11:36:11 No. 18030
>>18028 You denying it means nothing, the very existence of this thread and all others like it is proof. What was this thread meant to achieve? The people that did the reading already
can explain things in plain english (and if they can't, further study is required) and the things people here think needs to be "explained" to workers are either common sense or grasped intuitively – the only explanation for threads such as this is people looking for an excuse not to read and consume the simplest information possible and still call themselves communists, and thus discover that hiding behind the illiterate, retarded image of workers they have in their head is the way to go. I've seen this plenty of times with anarchists in particular, I got told "read Marx" is ableist because not everyone has time for that, as if their schedule of browsing reddit and playing videogames would be severely affected by 30min of reading every day. That is already beside the fact that people here think there is anything that
needs explaining in the first place, as if the working class needs to be "convinced" of socialism, which would go against literally everything Marx and Engels stood for (not that anyone in this thread could tell, nobody reads, especially not Marx). Workers don't
need to spend their ever second reading Marx, and the ones that choose to do so don't need much help, Marx is not a complicated read (unless you've had your brain turned into paste by the internet, not naming any names). Dumbing things down serves no purpose and is every bit detrimental, that's how you get "literacy is fascist" anarchoids and Richard "Co-ops = Communism" Wolff and people that think Marx just thought the gubbmint needed to invest in healthcare some more. Good work for the dude at
>>14199 but he made the mistake of thinking he was talking to likeminded people rather than hobbyists that might as well have the mental capacity of a concrete wall
TL;DR fuck modernizers fuck falsifiers read a fucking book
Anonymous 11-07-23 15:12:05 No. 19012
>>18605 Your quote has nothing to do with anything the other guy said, unless your point is "a-ha, proles ARE retarded!"
Frankly, the quote goes against your own point since Marx clearly states workers acquire consciousness through their own actions, and thus dumbing down theory in order to preach to them is useless
Anonymous 11-07-23 15:14:38 No. 19013
>>18246 There's a world of a difference between a shortened version of Capital written by Marx himself and a "Marx summary" written by someone who themselves probably gets their info from youtube or some shit. Literally in the pic your posted:
>If it is not written, some Moses or other will come along and do it and botch it up. Lmao
The Cafiero one is the best and got Marx's seal of approval, but even that one gets some things wrong vis-a-vis Marx.
Anonymous 12-07-23 12:06:14 No. 19021
>>19013 nobody ITT has suggested
> a "Marx summary" written by someone who themselves probably gets their info from youtube or some shit. so there is a "world of difference" between what this thread is suggesting, and what you're pretending the thread is suggesting.
Anonymous 13-07-23 02:40:57 No. 19045
>>14131 sorry if i'm crashing ur thread may i ask you OP when this was useful, like do people appreciate this or is this just a way they can comprehend what you're saying….
because honestly i think most people get like 95% of this, but it doesnt actually give actionable knowledge, it just tells how the situation is messed up, unfair, and contradicted (and contradictions are difficult to understand - its difficult for people who read marx even… actually it was difficult for marx as well! reproduction schemas are needed in order to understand how something so contradicted functions most of the time… so the big picture stuff is gonna be more confusing than anything even in a simple format)
I know there's the basically ubiquitous conception that communism develops out of the labor movement specifically, but history has proved this to not be the only way communism becomes relevant. It's imo an outdated conception from the 1800s labor movement, kept alive by dogmatic (no shade) leninism
just owing to the fact that this is part of Lenin's apparent model of communism and its relation to the working class . In a democracy, politics already exists for the people (even if there's suppression and widespread disdain and distrust of politics), there's no need to move from the economic to the political. The political is directly relevant in so many ways (i think everyone gets this so i wont even mention specific issues, but i can if it's not clear what i mean; i'm talking about all the various progressive issues that impact people's lives profoundly). There's much more room to activate someone into the wider movement by explaining the situation around some of these issues, and maybe directing them towards an organization, or resources, or just providing some roadmap… but idk this is how i feel, i wonder if anyone else sees it like this
The "you're exploited!" and "capitalism can't go on forever!" always rubbed me the wrong way; theyre correct but what bearing does this have on someone's life? "you could be getting more money if you unionized and fought the boss for it!" everyone knows that, but a problem in this era is that oftentimes they'll just close a workplace down or wait you out and give extremely minor concessions (that amount to keeping your pay the same, rather than a decrease). There's also retribution and blackballing that happens to organizers, in modern times (where finance takes a majority of the profits, and you take a personality quiz before getting hired, and employers can all easily share databases of problem candidates, and a felony bars you from most work…) companies don't need to deal with problem workers. There's chronic joblessness and instability that's maintained by the government and Fed. The workplace struggle isn't what it once was. (still important …. i just wanted to epmhasize how its not the only vector arriving at socialist politics. The varied progressive movements, of which the economic struggles are one part, as well as the communities and cultures of oppressed groups, whose oppression is just as necessary today in the imperialist stage of capitalism as it was in the colonial era.
(if u dont buy that look at nazi economics, how the economy can be stabilized (for some) by dispossessing people of othered identities) )
Anonymous 19-07-23 05:24:37 No. 19885
>>14135 > German workers read the first edition of Capital voraciously. It took me over a month of occasionally looking into this to finally find sales details for the first edition of capital in germany.
It took 5 years, 1867-1872 for Capital to sell only 1000 copies in Germany. I stand by my point. It was not "voraciously" consumed by working class people, it was purchased by political economists and intellectuals of the 1st international in a limited circulation. Perhaps later on in the East German Republic it was consumed voraciously by workers because it was
prescribed as part of a standard school curriculum , but in Marx's life time the book actually received the best sales in Russia. But still, those "best sales" were merely 3000 copies. This was not a widely circulated book outside of explicitly political circles until the 20th century, and it certainly wasn't read widely by non-partisan workers until actually existing socialist states made it part of an educational curriculum.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/DD7A28DA6B069F8E794696759DF72C41/S0037677900144924a.pdf/div-class-title-span-class-italic-das-kapital-span-comes-to-russia-div.pdf Anonymous 19-07-23 05:26:34 No. 19886
>>19046 1. we're in /edu/
2. where is it?
Anonymous 22-07-23 13:31:36 No. 19901
>>19896 Meanwhile in reality the simple fact of the matter is that they can.
Anybody have that screencap saved of the bartender pulling out Capital when a social reading group turned up?
Anonymous 22-07-23 13:41:27 No. 19904
>>19902 Fair enough
In that case I reference this example from
>>>/siberia/428887 >I dropped out at 17 and I could read it. It is of course still a complicated work and influences almost all social/political criticism onwards, but getting through it on its own is very much achievable. The thing you have to realize is that it has almost a literary quality to it, and isn't just dry theory. There's a very specific kind of didactic method throughout it. The historical records show that workers can and did read things like; Capital, and The Origin of Species.
Assuming literacy, so we're disregarding the USA here a downtrodden worker can pick up Capital volume 1 and understand it.
Marx wrote it with that intention.
This is a simple fact.
Anonymous 14-10-24 19:47:57 No. 22824
>>14135 This post is old but its the most important post in the entire website. Why, you may wonder: because its a psyop.
Accuse me of being a schizo, but I think antagonizing simple explanations for morons or the intellectually lazy is an FBI psyop designed to prevent us the commies from flipping the rightoid's target demographic: the intellectually lazy and the morons.
When people say shit like "no need to simplify! no need to dumb down! what are you a classist?" they're just weaponizing left wing rhetoric to prevent you from doing that which will actually work.
So I tell all of you: Dumb it all down, simplify then make it simpler. Make it spread.
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