>''Just read Capital''>Read a few chapters>Barely get itCould this be due to the translation? I find the language unclear a lot of times. English is my second language, and I can't read German unfortunately. Would it be a better idea to attempt a read in my native language, or should I just go over it again a couple of times?
Try reading the rest and go back and re-read the first bit and see if it helps. The first part of Capital is the hardest to understand
>>24092909Don't bother with Capital. Jump directly to contemporary relevant stuff
Have you read any of Marx's other works? It's best to start with some of his shorter works than jumping directly into Capital.
>>24092922I take it the whole first volume would suffice for this?>>24092939I've read parts of The German Ideology and the Manifesto a long time ago, as well as Wage Labour & Capital. Should I read Value, Price and Profit aswell or parts of something like the Grundrisse?
Read this instead. LTV was debunked in Marx's lifetime.
>>24092909lol
>>24092953Honestly, I'd just stick with Capital and take it slowly. Re-read chapters and sections if you must. Don't get too caught up in the opinions of others, but don't be afraid to ask questions for the sake of clarity.
>>24092909Communism makes sense. Away with the capitalist parasites. Structurize everything. The strongest to the top. For the flourishing of the folk.
>>24092936>The Crisis of CapitalismMarxists have been predicting Capitalism is on the verge of collapse since the 1800s
>>24093000so what, they didn't have crystal balls that predicted the future
>>24092936I am a bit skeptical of the idea that I should just jump ahead. I mean, aren't marxist works usually building on top of suppositions that were laid out by Marx? Besides, my interest at the moment is primarily in understanding the marxist critique out of my own interest.>>24092957How do you understand the LTV, and how do you think it was debunked in his lifetime? The way I understand it is that 'value' in Marx's theory of value does not mean the same thing as use-value and exchange-value, but rather is the representation of labour-time expended into a product, and that this is first and foremost how society *sees* value to Marx. That seems broadly true to me, insofar as we tend to pay people on the basis of time spent at work and place the value of commodities on this sort of scale (water is worth more than a phone in terms of use-value, but a phone is much more expensive because of all the work required to allow for its creation, including dead labor such as pre-existing infrastructure, old lithium mines, etc.) I get the impression that many people who claim to oppose the LTV rather assign 'use-value' to be the meaning of 'value', whereas in Marx these two things mean something seperate.
>>24093006Being a doom preacher that is constantly wrong makes you a fucking clown. If you keep trying to preach the end of days like some heretic prophet, you stop becoming someone to listen to and become the babbling schizo on the street corner that people avoid eye contact from when walking past.
>>24093471i'd rather be a babbling schizo than a class traitor
>>24093491Being loyal to a "class" is some gay made up marxist shit. Be loyal to your race. What truly matters is blood alone.
>>24093491>class traitorGet a load of this guy. Do you want to know who hates the lower more than anyone else? The lower class. They goddamn hate each other for more reasons than you can possibly imagine. They don't have the right beliefs, the right job, the right hobbies, the right life goals, and it goes on and fucking on. Of course, ask any fucking bluecollar retard about their life and they'll piss and moan about how "hawd" their life's been. How they've had "no oppewtunity" or how bad their "childhewd" was for them while being in their fucking 40s.So no, I have no pity for those shitheads that are the architects of their own fucking misery.
>>24093408>but a phone is much more expensive because of all the workNo. The supply side is limited by the the energy and resources that go into it including human labour, there's nothing special about the labour. If you make the same amount of phones using only robots the price people are willing to pay for it doesn't change.
>>24092909He is talking about economics and things. What is so hard to understand about it? Get a notebook and make drawings and diagrams if you can't keep up with it.
>>24093408>water is worth more than a phone in terms of use-valuedisagree, water has no GPS nor wi-fi and i can't watch tiktoks on it
D.E.B.U.N.K.E.D.
>>24093600You're forgetting the distinction between dead and living labour. Living labour is just the guy making the phone, and yeah, obviously that wouldn't be that much work on its own, but dead labour includes all the labour that was necessary to get the guy to the point of making the phone, iirc. Phones built entirely by robots would still have a lot of dead labour embedded within them, as a lot of work had to be done to be able to build those robots.
>>24093703But this has nothing to do with economics and it's not a novel insight that helps us model anything. A trace of the "dead labour" needed to do anything back a few generations is dwarfed by the death and suffering of ancestral organisms in the distant past. If we include all that we can say the labour that built the phones was mostly contributed by the ancestors of white people, while we enslave chinks to actually physically make the phones. It's not a helpful framing.If a bunch of phones magically appear with no effort by anyone it doesn't change the market value or usefulness of the phones. There's no divine law of fairness or whatever that decrees that because they cost nothing to make they "should" cost nothing to buy.
>>24092909What's your native language Anon? It's likely to be easier to read Capital in your native language rather than in your second language. If you still want to read it in English, recently a new translation of Capital by Paul Reitter has been published. That may be easier for you to readRegardless as other Anons have said, the first few chapters on the Commodity form are the hardest to understand since they're the most abstract. But they provide the foundation that Marx builds off on. So re-read those chapters, even if it doesn't fully click with you yet keep reading on. Also try to find a group to read Capital with to help get more out of it>>24092936xD literally what's the point of skipping Capital, especially to read books that build off of Capital and assume you've already read it. This also implies that Capital is somehow not relevant in the modern day
>>24092909Don't waste time with Marx. Go straight to Bakunin.
>>24092957LTV is a lens by which to examine an economic system. It can't be debunked.
>>24092909Man you ESL fucks piss me off by simply existing
>>24092909His footnotes are where the enjoyment is. He's like if DFW was a good author.
>>24093674>What is a Good?
>>24093985Imo Proudhon is the better anarchist counterpoint to Marx.If Marx hadn't autistically ground their friendship (and Proudhon's career) to dust the history of the world could have been much different.
>>24092909>Would it be a better idea to attempt a read in my native languageWhy are you reading an English translation in the first place if English isn't your native language and there's a translation in your native language?
>>24094022If it's not falsifiable doesn't that mean it's not scientific?
>>24094372>Economics>ScientificAnon, I...
>>24094602>ThisIt's always strange to see people use Marx's own rhetoric, verbatim, while attempting to disprove him.
>>24093866>If a bunch of phones magically appear with no effort by anyone it doesn't change the market value or usefulness of the phones.I really don't think that's true. It doesn't change the usefulness, yes (as that is use-value, and is unrelated to labour in Marx), but it would almost certainly lower their market value due to the increased ease of accessibility, unless somehow someone managed to take control of the phone-spawner and hid its existence from everyone. To be fair, that scenario is an indication to me that you're at the least partially right, because it already implies that value isn't strictly determined by labour, and is at the very least more complex. But then again, Marx is trying to talk in generalities on a global-economical scale.>>24093915Dutch, which is why I'm fairly confident it might be a good idea to try, since it's close enough to German at least. I read Nietzsche in Dutch and found it far more comprehensible than English.
>>24092909The difficulties stem from trying to assume infinite divisibility of extention, form, and so forth. There is no way to even know what a substance is. Merely trying to contemplate heat being a privation of cold and vice versa is already dependent upon senses. I no longer know if there is even an infinitely perfect being I can compare myself to or if this is just another daemon trying to impress itself upon my mind. Languages won't help you, you are still trying to use senses.
>>24092909People scrub out all the time (with an English translation as native English speakers). I did. But if you fancy that you are better than average, I guess just power through?
>>24095147>but it would almost certainly lower their market value due to the increased ease of accessibilityNo. The price is only a result of supply and demand and the "use value" is subjective, in 10-20 years the phones are considered outdated and worthless but the phone didn't change.>value isn't strictly determined by labourIt has absolutely nothing to do with labour. It's not a factor.
>>24092936>Jump directly to contemporary relevant stuffBut this is liberalism, not Marxism.>>24092939I really don't think Kapital was that great altogether. There are other writings like the letters to Hegel and the Principles of Communism that lay out the worldview much more succinctly.
>>24095501>in 10-20 years the phones are considered outdated and worthless but the phone didn't change.See this is a tedious argument. First we say that the phone, or the dollar, has changed value. Then we say that value must be artificial. But the value isn't artificial inherently, the value is being artificialized intentionally. Old designs are still worthwhile, and you see that in 'vintage' products which actually sale for more, but again, through the intentionality of artificiality.
>>24095532>the value isn't artificial inherently, the value is being artificialized intentionally.Deranged horseshit. You're working as hard as you can to avoid understanding anything about the actual real world. Supply and demand dictate price. How much an individual wants a thing is subjective. If nobody wants the thing its price is low. Labour doesn't have anything to do with price except as one of a million limiting factor to how much you can produce of the thing.Labour has nothing to do with price. Claiming it does is not a "theory", it's just flat out retarded shit you can disprove by simply checking if it does. Assigning a value to things based on the labour put into them can be informative but it has nothing to do with price and it's not a "theory" either, it's a choice to focus on information about labour.
>>24095501>The price is only a result of supply and demandThat is contradictory to what you implied in >>24093866, as that would be an increase in supply.>It has absolutely nothing to do with labour. It's not a factor.That seems overly reductive to me. The amount of labour that is performed to produce phones is a factor in its supply. Again, if phones just magically spawned out of the air, their supply would increase massively, and if it became easier to manufacture phones, their supply would also increase massively (ignoring factors like waste regulations of course).>>24095621>If nobody wants the thing its price is low.If nobody wants the thing /and/ it is easily accessible. Water's price would be through the roof if it was hard to come by, as everyone wants and needs it.You forget that value and exchange-value are not the same thing. We pay waged workers in a monetary valuation that we deem to be equal to the time they spend working on things.
>>24095981>as that would be an increase in supply.The point is the source doesn't change their price and you're working incredibly hard to avoid that point, including making up new stories in your head about an infinite source of phones.>The amount of labour that is performed to produce phones is a factor in its supplyIs something I explicitly said you illiterate, dishonest fucking freak.>You forget that value and exchange-value are not the same thing.I said price to avoid that confusion but you can't read, instead of spending energy on trying to read you spend your energy on trying to subvert the meaning of the text.>We pay waged workers in a monetary valuation that we deem to be equal to the time they spend working on things.No we fucking don't. Nobody does that and nobody ever did that including the most extreme commies. The buyer tries to get the labour as cheap as possible and the labourer tries to maximize the price of what he's selling, supply and demand. The more labourers you have access to the lower the wages you're compelled to pay, even if those wages don't cover basic living expenses. More people will find ways to make the meager wages work, by lowering their standards and living in hovels.
>>24096230>including making up new stories in your head about an infinite source of phones.??? You made up that hypothetical >>24093866 here bro.>Is something I explicitly said you illiterate, dishonest fucking freak.Then why deny that labour is a factor in value? If it is a factor in supply, and supply is part of what determines value, then labour is a value-determining factor.>>24096230>No we fucking don't. Nobody does that and nobody ever did that including the most extreme commies.No it's capitalists that do that. And yes they do lol. Look at the minimum wage. That's what that is. It's hourly compensation for your work, that is a temporal measure of what your work is worth.You're arguing against multiple people, by the way. Just thought you should know.
>>24096268>You made up that hypotheticalYou did you illiterate liar.>If a bunch of phones magically appear with no effort by anyone it doesn't change the market value or usefulness of the phones.A "bunch" is not an infinite supply. If this bunch adds to supply they lower the average price by as much as if that bunch was made with great effort. I shouldn't need to spoonfeed you this shit, you're actively working to avoid understanding anything I say.>Then why deny that labour is a factor in value?I didn't, you illiterate lying subhuman. It has no special significance over any of the other factors that limit supply. If you produce a normally labour intensive product with no labour but the supply and demand dynamics don't change the price doesn't change.>Look at the minimum wage.Is a top down effort to regulate prices, to force the buyer to buy something at a price that doesn't make sense and it doesn't work. As far as it works as a price control it would just mean fewer people get employed, which in turn increases the supply side. In practice the dollar tokens are simply devalued through inflation as there are more people with dollar tokens, creating more demand for products that now have fewer people producing them. The only reason this isn't a devastating effect is because globalism, China eats the inflation, producing more to satisfy the new demand.>You're arguing against multiple peopleI'm arguing against the same deranged brainwashing that doesn't originate from any of you dishonest programmed robots. You're effectively the same robots.
