/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>1858712
And just to illustrate, google returns ZERO fucking results for this nonsensical bullshit term you just made up. And no meaningfull matches if looked up without quotations.
No investigation, no right to speak. Go watch an intro into marxian economics on youtube my guy.

>>1858163
>Wrong, material production still happened, and the company didn't lose money. Is this some sort of weird capitalist religion you're making up, where autistically moving numbers around on a spreadsheet is "materialism"?
Even though the guy you're replying to is completely retarded, this is wrong as well.
Productive labour, as defined by marx, is productive from the perspective of the economic system. Anything that makes some commodity that can be sold at a profit (or rather, any labour that is done that increase capital) via the work of said labour is by definition productive to capitalism, and anything that is work that does not increase capital is per definition unproductive. So socialised healthcare, to capitalism, is unproductive labour, but employing people to make shiny spheres out of poop to sell to dumb hipsters is productive, because it makes profit and that profit becomes more capital.

<That worker is productive who performs productive labour, and that labour is productive which directly creates surplus value, i.e. valorises capital.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02b.htm

I didnt make the definitions, marx himself did. So yes, actually, if the numbers on the spreadsheet goes up it is productive labour.

>>1858571
>If use value lies in using a thing then it's not really wrong though a bit punny to say that money has use value which lies in it being exchanged.
The term use value litterally just means "the concrete thing in itself". The use value of a doughnut is that it is a doughnut and can do doughtnut things or have things done with it that are the properties of it being a doughnut.
IDK why marx used such a retarded definition and then used the word "value" for it, given that its immeasurable and incomprable, but alas.
So in that sense, the use value of money is not really there, because money as money cannot be used. The use value of a 2 euro coin is that it is pretty to look at and could potentially have a funny little drawing of a stick figure on the back. You could chuck it at homeless people too. But the fact that you can buy a loaf of bread with it is not a property of the coin in itself, it is not the use value of the coin, just like how the use value of a car I made to sell is not the fact that I can sell it, but the fact that its a car.

>>1858734
Litterally ZERO mention of UNneccecary labour time there as well.
Perhaps get checked for dyslexia my guy.

>>1858736
Legitimately I thought you were saying he made up social necessary labour. I thought I was going to have a brain aneurysm.
I can't read, apologies.

>>1858739
Trying to gaslight a board full of communists that Marx never used SNLT would be quite an achievement.

>>1855155
>The intended audience of Capital was the general public
Yeah, and from their letters around the time Capital Vol I was published we know that Marx wanted the book to be read by the common worker. I think he would've been pissed off to find out that leftists are avoiding the book for one reason or another.

>>1855155
>The intended audience of Capital was the general public.

Pics related from this thread:
https://leftypol.org/edu/res/14131.html

>>1858771
>lack of commercial success proving this or that about author's intent
…
How about you give an actual example of something you found hard to understand in Capital and that you only got to understand by reading some Aristotle or Hegel or Smith or Ricardo or what.

>>1858773
Karl Marx was known to his friends as the Moor, since his college days. If you didn't call him that, you were basically no buddy of his.
>Anyone who knew Moor as he was at home and within his intimate circle, is aware that he was never called Marx there, or even Karl, but only Moor, just as each of us had his own nickname; indeed, at the point where nicknames ceased so too did the closest intimacy. Moor had been his nickname since his university days and on the Neue Rheinische Leitung he was always called Moor. If I had addressed him in any other way he would have thought something was amiss that needed putting right.
~ Engels

>>1858815
>How about you give an actual example of something you found hard to understand in Capital
Where did I say I found capital hard to understand? Why are you asking me to prove an assertion I didn't make?
>lack of commercial success proving this or that about author's intent
I'm not making a statement about the author's intent. I'm making a statement about something much more important: There is very little evidence that workers were widely reading capital when it came out. Books of that size and scope were expensive consumer goods. Even if the average German worker in 1867 was educated enough to understand capital, or had enough free time to read it, in all likelyhood they were not spending their limited income on that instead of food, water, shelter, child care, etc. In fact, one of the main points capital drives home again and again is that proletarians barely have any disposable income. The evidence, regardless of Marx's intent, is that Capital was not widely read by workers until the 20th century, when AES governments made it part of public school curriculum. And even then, it was a subject of special interest. The problem with Capital isn't that workers can't understand it, but that they aren't picking it up in the first place.

>>1858858
>Where did I say I found capital hard to understand? Why are you asking me to prove an assertion I didn't make?
Then why did you reply to this post >>1855155 at all? People expect that replies have something to do with what they reply to.

>>1858868
Because they said
> SIX fricking prefaces and it never occurs to Marx and Engels to tell the reader which other works you must be familiar with first!
And while they never said in the prefaces that they expected anyone to read preliminary material, Engels expressed to Marx in a private letter that there was need for an abridged, shorter, cheaper version of capital that 19th century workers would have the time and money to read. And Marx himself praise Carlo Cafiero's 1879 summary of Capital before dying, despite the fact that others later criticized it. So there is some strong evidence in favor of, to quote Engels, an "urgent necessity" for quote "a popular short presentation of the content" of Capital. The results were at odds with the Authorial intent, and Engels expressed as such while and Marx were still alive. And why would Marx have praised Cafiero's summary otherwise?

>>1858771
>some Moses or other will come along and botch it up
Prescient!

>>1858879
>Engels expressed to Marx in a private letter that there was need for an abridged, shorter, cheaper version of capital
The point made by >>1855155 is that you don't need familiarity with other works in order to understand Capital though. The letter by Engels does not claim otherwise.

>>1858897
>you don't need familiarity with other works in order to understand Capital though
You do however need the Grundrisse in order to not make dumb, counter-revolutionary mistakes about the purpose of the series. And we have had more than one Moses come along and "botch it up" at the very least!

Perhaps this is a dumb question: Isn't the political struggle of the laboring class, the proletariat, to take power from the bourgeoisie, and restructure society, of central importance? Isn't all the obsession with proving that the labor power of the working class produces value mostly a philosophical exercise? The working class already knows this intuitively, and the ruling class knows it even if they lie to the contrary. The bourgeoisie are not going to give up their power because they hear irrefutable arguments. They spit on Marx and his successors and distort their words.

To me it does not matter if someone reads Grundrisse, then value price and profit, then wage labor and capital, then all 3 volumes of capital, then all 3 volumes of theories of surplus value, etc. etc. It doesn't matter if they digest these voluminous works. What matters is whether they actually take political power in their life time by organizing and working within collective organizations.

Some will always say that a diamond sitting in the ground has no intrinsic value, and that the value realized at the point of purchase came from the labor power used to discover, extract, and refine it. Others will say that the value of the diamond is intrinsic due to its quality of being rare and hard to get, and that it always has this value whether it gets mined or not. It seems a mostly semantic argument. The real issue is that value is never realized by humans without the intervention of labor in acquiring things, whether or not their value is intrinsic, or imparted to them through value-added labor inputs. The workers already know this. The capitalists already know this and lie about it. All that's left is the struggle for power and supremacy.

People shouldn't waste time and effort defending LTV when the basic premise of exploitation of surplus value still holds in modern economics.

>>1858970
it's important because influential elements in the movement keep believing it's possible to compromise with the capitalists, that merely pushing for higher wages and better working conditions is enough

>>1858994
you don't push for higher wages and better working conditions because it's "enough." You do it so the workers can live longer and fight harder.

>>1859003
that too

>>1858936
<You need to read the UNFINISHED ROUGH DRAFT NOT MEANT FOR PUBLICATION to understand this PUBLISHED AND HIGHLY POLISHED WORK
Can you give an example for a section of Capital you did not understand, but then you read that other text and after that you could understand the section of Capital.

>>1858970
>Isn't all the obsession with proving that the labor power of the working class produces value mostly a philosophical exercise?
The critique was necessary. People who are obsessed with the details of the critique are, IMO, trying to avert revolutionary activity by recuperating Marxism into bourgeois politics, just as Marx called out various 19th century seniles for in Manifesto chapter 3.
>What matters is whether they actually take political power in their life time by organizing and working within collective organizations.
That reflex to Christian homilies and romantic sentiments is very much a symptom of petit-bourgeois reaction. Anyone who reads the Bible into Marx is only trying to save their ability to tell others what to do and have society back them up unquestioningly. All of them would be better off deactivated, demoralized, and demobilized, but the Christian empire does not allow for that.
>It seems a mostly semantic argument
Quite to the contrary! Entire societies and cultures evolve from the ramifications of these theories of value as we condition our everyday actions both on and in the real world to accord to them.
>The real issue is that value is never realized by humans without the intervention of labor in acquiring things
No, that's social fetishism. Post diploma

>>1859036
>bourgeois economics is eternal
You read the Introduction/Appendix because it anticipates and rejects that opinion. The fact that you've built a cult around a bourgeois economics textbook is truly pathetic. Post your soft hands

>>1859254
>y-you're christian actually, y-you're reading the bible into marx
man people on here will literally just make shit up about what you're saying. I'm done with this Quranic nonsense you're doing.

>>1859251
What have you actually read of Marx and why won't you give an actual example that would illustrate your claim?
>>1859256
?? Did you mean to reply to another post

>>1859296
>What have you actually read of Marx and why won't you give an actual example that would illustrate your claim?

Quote the claim I made.

>>1859344
>Quote the claim I made.
>>1858936
>You do however need the Grundrisse in order to not make dumb, counter-revolutionary mistakes about the purpose of the series.
So what is such a mistake that you made and corrected after reading Grundrisse?

>>1859356
Where did I claim that I made a mistake?

>>1859356
Your rhetorical gamesa bore me. Economic determinism is a mental illness.

>>1859273
I didn't say you were reading the bible into Marx, I said you were reading Marx like a Bible.

>>1859511
So are you saying you read Grundrisse before Capital? What is then one of those mistakes you hypothetically would have made if you had tackled Capital without Grundrisse?

>>1859528
>I didn't say you were reading the bible into Marx, I said you were reading Marx like a Bible.
Except you did:
>>1859254
>Anyone who reads the Bible into Marx is only trying to save their ability to tell others what to do and have society back them up unquestioningly.

>>1859578
Are you identifying as "anyone"?

>>1858712
Okay so i found the source of my discrepancy. Its in the 1st preface of capital vol. 2 where it speaks about "surplus-labour" creating surplus-value, where surplus is defined as the labour unpaid as wages. In the introduction engels also prefaces the point that it is not labour itself which creates Value(s), but labour-power that is employed by the capitalist.
So "socially unnecessary labour-time" can be rendered as "surplus-labour".
Also, here's some context for my claim that SNLT *is* Value in its meaningful (socially-realised) sense.
[Labour-Power = Value = SNLT]
[Surplus-Labour = Surplus-Value]
>It has been correctly formulated by Marx and thereby been answered. It is not labour which has a value. As an activity which creates values it can no more have any special value than gravity can have any special weight, heat any special temperature, electricity any special strength of current. It is not labour which is bought and sold as a commodity, but labour-power. As soon as labour-power becomes a commodity, its value is determined by the labour embodied in this commodity as a social product. This value is equal to the labour socially necessary for the production and reproduction of this commodity. Hence the purchase and sale of labour-power on the basis of its value thus defined does not at all contradict the economic law of value.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch00.htm#1885
This is also why i say that marx is not a thinker of the LTV, but is a thinker of the labour-power theory of Value. The difference between smith and marx is the discovery of surplus-value as surplus-labour, which is capital (as unliving labour) itself.

U.S.-Saudi Petrodollar Pact Ends after 50 Years
https://archive.ph/A1bnR

>>1853623
There was this thing called the Great Depression, I don’t know if you have heard of it. Gold was standard then and shit collapsed hard and governments couldn’t spend because gold wasn’t stable and so fiscal spending on the working class was impossible.

>>1885141
Three days later it's a nothingburger

>>1885145
>the Great Depression
Which one, and which century are you living in?

has anyone come up with a marxist theory of FINANCE?

>>1885717
We need a business economy course in university focused on marxism leninism praxis in the modern world. Marxism leninism in the era of cybercomunications and advanced simulation models of growth.

/leftybros/ how do you respond to this critique?:
>Marx’s logical error was simple enough: he confused what might be called an ontological question with an economic question. Ultimately—ontologically—it is true that all economic value emerges from human labor. But it does not therefore follow that you can infer economic truths from ontological ones. Economic value is not really a “thing” or a “substance.” Rather, it is a subjective assessment placed on a product by an end consumer. This consumer does not typically care how much labor went into the product, only that the product satisfies a particular need. One pair of shoes may be made entirely by robots, another may be made entirely by men, but an end consumer could still assess both as having the same value.

>>1885765
>consumer does not typically care how much labor went into the product…
It is not necessary that one cares about that for labor ratios to correlate with price ratios. If markets are competitive, why wouldn't price ratios correlate with input ratios? The onus is on the person who claims otherwise :P
>…only that the product satisfies a particular need.
I don't know where that guy buys his shoes and hamburgers, but most of these are mass-produced items. From the POV of the individual consumer, the price is a given fact and not something dependent on their individual motivations.
>One pair of shoes may be made entirely by robots, another may be made entirely by men, but an end consumer could still assess both as having the same value.
I don't think the person who wrote that is familiar with Marx, because Marx addressed this in the first chapter of Capital Volume I:
<Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as anyother, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skilland intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.