starting to read political philosophy and finished the communist manifesto. would like to hear your thoughts on it
>>25412982Sorry I don't really read
>>25412982Refuted by GCC Islamism. Qatar for example has created a society where there is no possibility of class struggle, as proletariat, bourgeoisie and monarch are united under Islamism. Capitalism is made permanently stable.
>>25412982you first haha i’m shy
>>25412982
you are the Marxist that posts about this all the time but hasn't read Capital
Marx had the right diagnosis but wrong prescription. Communism and Capitalism are both failed systems that eventually concentrate most of a country's wealth to a few privileged elite. A third economic option needs to be pursued.
>>25412982A fundamentally outdated work, even at the time in which it started to become popular (around the 1870’s). Engels himself admits this in an introduction to the Manifesto in the early 1870’s. I guess it does a half decent job at explaining the general principles of Marx’s conception of historical materialism, but Marx would, in his later work, disagree with things written in the Manifesto, most prominently the idea of the supposed inevitability of “the revolution”. In the aforementioned introduction by Engels, he mentions that he only presents the unaltered text for preservation purposes and nothing else. Read the Principles of Communism by Engels instead. As a primer into communist thought, the Manifesto is no longer truly useful. But then again, communist thought itself is no longer really useful seeing as most western leftoids today are spineless pussies who will never accomplish anything. Make of that what you will.
>>25412982Communist Manifesto is minor compared to Kapital. Kapital should be read. CM should be treated like a relic of history. I recommend David Harvey's lectures on Kapital.
>>25412982Cliffnotes pamphlet really. It's mainly a call to arms to convey the essentials to rubes and rile them up. Kapital as said is where the real meat is. Also read Critique of Gotha Programme
>>25413369you can read a book without agreeing with the content within it. in no way am i communist. i had issues with the book and the ideology as a whole
>>25413443>Marx would, in his later work, disagree with things written in the Manifesto, most prominently the idea of the supposed inevitability of “the revolution”.Explain, isn’t the whole “capitalism is inherently unsustainable and communism inevitable” thing the crux of Marxism
>>25413443>But then again, communist thought itself is no longer really useful seeing as most western leftoids today are spineless pussies who will never accomplish anything.They don't serve in the army. A century ago there were a lot more well-armed and ruthless leftists around because of universal male conscription.
>>25413443I think you have to read it as a historical document. I like this post.
>>25412982"finished the manifesto" damn how long did it take to read 20 pages? off to the good start aren't we? read The Republic
>>25412982Paetel's The National Bolshevist Manifesto is more interesting to consider and ponder.
>>25413359interesting. i've not considered it really, but would you consider the UAE/Dubai situation of a local proletariat subsidised by the state but also served by an imported proletariat class beneath them as solving the issues? i don't know about Qatar to speak about it, but in Dubai, making the indigenous population comfortable while exploiting (in the marxist sense) a lower section of society ins't refuting marx's complaints or making anything stable.
>>25412982>>25413443 is correct. The manifesto was written for a specific semi-anarchic brand of revolutionnaries in the 1848 revolutions. It was written quickly without much details. Beyond that the text suffers from the same problem that historical materialism does in marxism. It circonscripts revolutionnary potential to the proletariat and conditions the potential occurence of a revolution on a techno-deterministic reading of history. The marxist dialectic goes along like this :>men organize their labors through relations of production>new technology, techniques or knowledge opens up the possibility of a more rational organization of labor>one class wants to ablish the old relations, another doesn't; this produces class conflictThe issue with this is that what seems rational to organize labor is contingent on the given society. In capitalism we judge the potential efficiency gains in relation to how we produce value. As such, technology doesn't by itself transform what is "rational" or not, they can only operate within a given context. What actually changes social organizations is simply social conflict, and not necessarily class conflict over the development of the means of productions. Another thing that Marx accidentally opens up to scrutiny is the claim that only the proletariat has the potential to be a revolutionnary subject. If the proletariat has a historic task, it must be justified either in regards to his own self-interest, or in regards to another external injunction. As it stands, the justification by virtue of interests doesn't work because initiating a revolution is considerably more risky than attempting at getting rich. The more "rational" organization for the proletariat would simply be to minimize economic externalities and extend welfare from capital gains.
>>25413359gay
>>25413410no, thats me
>>25413369ok now do magaor really fuck that do Trumppost what he looks likeand the queer shit people invent about him
>>25413418If you mean natsoc, obviously is Capitalism. It's wage labor surplus value accumulation.To my knowledge no one a ever proposed a serious alternative to Capitalism or State Capitalism.
>>25412982I hate the manifesto because midwits think they have read Marx when they have read the manifesto.
>>25413369No communists on this picture. A State Capitalist, and an agent of the Capital.
It’s just propaganda with no arguments, read Capital.
>>25414431The UAE has secularized to the point where it is unstable. I am talking about countries like Qatar or Saudi Arabia where religion is so dominant it overrides all class struggle. A Muslim worker in Saudi Arabia will never engage in class struggle alongside non-Muslim workers, he will side with the Muslim bourgeoisie instead. The only societal conflict is between those who feel the religious laws are not intense enough and those who think it is acceptable. Perhaps a Marxist would call it false consciousness but it has triumphed completely in that society. There will never be class struggle or a revolution in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Qatar, etc. Islam has ensured the working class remains obedient.The only risk to this system comes if a large majority of the working class is non-Muslim or if the country loosens its religious laws. The Pakistani labor pool ensures the Arab states never face the first issue and their system is built to never moderate on religious issues.
>>25412982the labor theory of value is horse shit, because low value tasks like literally shoveling horse shit are very hard labor.communist ideology is a sophist excuse for mass theft./thread
>>25415139I know this is bait but I was genuinely shocked by just how bad right-wing critiques of Capital were when I finally got around to reading it. It's like they have a mental block that prevents them from understanding his ideas.
>>25412982Now read picrel
>>25415184Its because what is there to critique? Its ahistorical unscientific nonsense.
>>25415283>NOOO! You can't reason out the nature of capital a priori! That's heckin' cheating!!!!!inb4 some retard says Capital is a posteriori because it contains so much economic data. It is a priori, this is why it's so disturbing to liberals. It's not "falsifiable" by any economic data, Marx reasons out the nature of the commodity and the nature of money and then thinks through how it's possible to profit from labor etc. A priori, with empirical illustrations.
>>25412982Shit-tier philosophy
>>25412982Now read Capital as Power
>>25415298
>>25415298>value cannot be derived simply by counting unskilled labor hoursMarx never claims as much. The 'unskilled labor hour' is an abstraction: capitalism brings it about that the labor of an engineer and of a porter are comparable (marketable) and the hypothetical unit is an hour of unskilled labor. Rather than reducing the entire economy to the most unskilled labor, the hypothetical unit of an hour of unskilled labor is what allows Marx to analyze a complex economy in which much of the labor is skilled - even in factories or agriculture there are more- and less-skilled workers, let alone other spheres. This Nitzan guy got filtered badly and so did you.
>>25415339He also says explicitly early in Capital that he's speaking in terms of unskilled labor alone for the sake of simplicity. To calculate what unskilled labor was worth I you'd need to figure out the value produced by the least productive workers whose productivity is not being artificially lowered by oversupply, natural disasters, etc. (not their wage obviously). And once you had that number you really could say 'a proctologist does 300 hours of unskilled labor in a day'. But Marx does not need to do this to carry out his analysis.
you wasted your time and some braincells
>>25415339>The 'unskilled labor hour' is an abstraction>This Nitzan guy got filtered badlyAnd the second pic >>25415300 is a continuation that deals with Marx's attemps to convert skilled labor into unskilled labour, and why it doesn't work neither.
>>25415390He is right that Marx was wrong to see the value of skilled labor as lying in its education alone, I should have said that I agreed with him there. But even here he screws up because Marx was talking about the wages of skilled labor being higher because of education, not the value of what they produce. Then he says it's "circular" to quantify labor based on prices. Of course it's circular, that value = labor is a first premise of Marxism. I'm sorry anon but you're wrong and he is wrong as well, both on logical and textual grounds.
>>25413959Depends on the book. In 1844 he laughs at the idea of Progress for being a spook, in 1850s he calls for the genocide of reactionary races in his personal letters.
>>25413705Nobody is fooled by your false-flagging.>>25414487MAGAtards don't intrude on /lit/. The reason we get the commies here is because they're laughed out of /pol/.>>25414580>tHeY'rE nOt ReAl GoMmUnIsTs
>>25415291Liberal is just a buzzword used by Marxists for those who refuse to accept their dogma.
BRo how the fuck is anyone a communist in 2026You need to be shot unironically
I read Chapter 1 of Capital, and it's mostly ok, but I have some criticisms. Labour-time is the unit of value, but there is no evidence to suggest that something that requires 4 times the amount of labour put into it is 4 times the price/exchange value. Labour-time also gets a lot of asterisks to make up for valueless items and rare items not having their exchange-values being proportional with labour-time. Also, price is a social value placed on a commodity by society, not a direct reflection of labour-time.
>>25413359Gulf states are semi peripheral shitholes who live under the global imperium protection racket.
>>25415744Erm well actually the value of a good is determined by the socially necessary labour timeJust ignore that there is no actual mechanism to calculate this or any sort of accounting for the fact that technology improves and reduces this
I havent been able to get past the first three chapters of Captial as they are painfully dry. However, whenever I open to later sections like those on machinery and industrialization, its so much more interesting and actually insightful. I also read Capitals section on primitive accumulation in a college property rights course and im always amazed by how anti-marxists just gleam over it while sucking capitalism off as natural and just. I really like Marx the historian and journalist.
>>25415776Yeah the section on primitive accumulation is one of my favorites.>>25415772>Just ignore that there is no actual mechanism to calculate this There is, it's called the price system. This is all Marx is referring to. Besides the fact that he says this openly you will come across passages where the price of a good rises or falls because of supply and demand and he says the socially necessary labor time has risen or fallen. If you're a potter and you spend 6 hours making pots but there's a glut on the market then you have done less socially necessary labor than you did when they were scarcer. People get filtered by this endlessly.
>>25415772>sort of accounting for the fact that technology improves and reduces thisThe role of technology in increasing worker productivity is central to the book. Did you even read it?
>>25415802And how do you calculate it?>>25415806Except it again doesn't actually have a way to calculate the impact of it
>>25415815nta but I believe Ernest Mandel talks about the calculatability of labor time in his introduction to Capital volume 1, you might want to check that out if you’re interested.
>>25415815It doesn't matter whether you can calculate, Capital isn't about econometrics. This is such a typical liberal line. You definitely could not use Marx's theories to run the Federal Reserve or to 'manage' a capitalist economy, it isn't equipped to do that, it's asking questions of a higher order. But within this meta framework the math isn't complicated, it's all basic arithmetic desu.
>>25415825>It doesn't matter whether you can calculatelol
>>25415825>>25415823>>25415815>>25415802>>25415776>>25415744good clear discussionthanks
