/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17203499]

I hate him, and I hate how his ideas are regurgitated despite having been refuted long ago. What explains his enduring appeal?

[Anonymous No.17203507]

>>17203499
he was a NEET so he appeals to NEETs simple as

[Anonymous No.17203508]

>>17203499
read derrida - specters of marx

[Anonymous No.17203516]

>>17203499
He's more right than wrong and so his novel ideas are enduring.
Capitalism is the world we live and will keep on living in, so his topic is timeless.

[Anonymous No.17203531]

>>17203499
losers are angry that there's variation in human success

[Anonymous No.17203605]

Xi Jinping - Address at the Conference in Commemoration of the 200th Anniversary of Marx's Birth.
http://english.qstheory.cn/2018-09/07/c_1123371913.htm

[Anonymous No.17203631]

>>17203605
scrawny maga trad larping retards will ignore this

[Anonymous No.17203692]

love me Che

[Anonymous No.17203703]

>>17203499
>I hate him, and I hate how his ideas are regurgitated despite having been refuted long ago.
Based, Buttercunt BTFO

[Anonymous No.17203732]

>>17203605
>his strong character and historical achievements
>historical achievements

Yikes.

[Anonymous No.17203753]

>>17203703
Butterfag isn't really a Marxist, I think he accepts Marxist critique of capitalism and some Marxist socialists like Cockshott but not dialectical materialism

[Anonymous No.17203759]

>>17203499
Get some bitches on your dick

[Anonymous No.17203766]

>>17203508
Based Derrida poster

[Anonymous No.17203776]

>>17203732
China is the preeminent rising superpower consciously pursuing Marxist theory of economic development towards socialism adjusting to the material conditions of society and pragmatic realities in order to achieve this goal.

Many commentators predict this to be a century dominated by China, a rapidly advancing society pursuing the socialist mode of production that educates its students and leaders in Marxist theory vs. the US, a declining superpower succumbing to neoliberalism, inequality, and internal divisions.

[Anonymous No.17203794]

>>17203776
[¥100 have been transferred to your account]

[Anonymous No.17203797]

People really want a "totally not a utopia" utopia

[Anonymous No.17203808]

>>17203776
The US disregards the teachings of Marx and praises the likes of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman instead. This appeals to Western greed vs Chinese unity and community. Western youth are seeing declining standards of living relative to past generations and rising dominance of China. The US is only going to continue to get worse, especially if they continue to ignore the problem they created. This is why far left and far right are rising, to clean up capital's mess.

[Anonymous No.17203818]

>>17203776
>china
>pursuing the socialist mode of production
top zoz

[Anonymous No.17203837]

>>17203499
Its not about ideas its about methodology
People develop, changed, critique and transformed or translated his ideas
Ideas dont stop at "refutation" and even then, refutations themselves can be refuted

[Blarty Hongo !WegkZP4tiw No.17203849]

>>17203499
It's because other people are dumber than you are. If everyone else was smart, they would have the same opinions as you.

Seriously though, it's a little strange to "hate" a historical figure.

[Anonymous No.17203856]

>>17203499
His Ideas were never refuted you fucking moron.
Refute the Labour Theory of Value right fucking now, Refute his analysis of economical crisis right now, refute historical materialism right now you moron.

Can you refute his analysis of Surplus Value extraction? Please do so since no other economist ever has done so

[Anonymous No.17203858]

>>17203818
>

>Xi said, "Marx and Engels’ analysis of the basic contradictions in capitalist society is not outdated, nor is the historical materialist view that capitalism is bound to die out and socialism is bound to win.”

[Anonymous No.17203877]

>>17203856
>Refute the Labour Theory of Value
there is no way you are so new that you have not seen this discussion repeated a million times in these threads. anyway, it's not /lit/-related. please just take this to some other board.

[Anonymous No.17203888]

>>17203856
>refute his LTV
oh no no no he doesn't know

[Anonymous No.17203902]

>>17203499
Many see him as a symbol of their egalitarian beliefs (also terrible but that's another matter entirely) and make do with his specific brand of retardation in theoretical matters because of this perceived influence.
Then there are morons that actually like his "methodology" such as >>17203837. It shouldn't surprise you after knowing Hegel or Russel also have sycophants.

[Anonymous No.17203935]

>>17203858
>rhetoric

Woah damn das crazy

[Anonymous No.17203944]

>>17203499
His ideas have been disagreed with, not refuted. BIG difference.

[Anonymous No.17203960]

>>17203499
Because both the right and the left think alienation is a problem

[Anonymous No.17203971]

>What explains his enduring appeal?

He triggers Americans

[Anonymous No.17203981]

>>17203902
>Many see him as a symbol of their egalitarian beliefs
No, only the people who don't read Marx and dislike him -- people like you -- associate him with egalitarianism. He was explicitly not egalitarian, and everyone who's read him knows that.

[Anonymous No.17203988]

Marxism doesn't reflect the deeper realities of human nature. What separates us from a herd of sheep or an ant colony is our individuality and self agency. We have free will and control our own destiny as intelligent lifeforms. We can shape the world to our will and will look out for our interests rather than some abstract "class solidarity". I will look out for me, mine, and maybe my friends. Not some random fuck I've never met who makes the same income as me.

[Anonymous No.17203996]

>>17203808
Pseud Anglo take, this is what white people trying to understand Confucianism sound like. Anyone who is a Randian in normal U.S. society is considered a pariah. Rand Paul? U.S. is quintessentially collectivist at this point. Stop reading bad pseudo-Confucian Anglo literature and read Deng Xiaoping

[Anonymous No.17204008]

>>17203776
>>17203808
China is a shithole.

[Anonymous No.17204022]

>>17203960
What is the opposite of alienation?
Everything can be framed as alienation. Marxist concepts are pseudo-scientific and vague.

[Anonymous No.17204036]

>>17203877
huh? OP claimed Marx ideas have been refuted long ago, how is it not related if I tell him that he is wrong and, in fact, it hasnt been refuted by anyone, historical materialism as well as any other economic analysis he made

[Anonymous No.17204037]

it has given young people ideas about what they can do to achieve a better tomorrow. it is the most thorough and important critique of the system we live in today that is not working for many of us so we look to these lessons from the past great thinkers.

many are drawn to marxism and class struggle to be part of a real movement seeking action and alternative. they are coming together to challenge injustice. of course this appeals to a generation who have been burned out by the false promises of the american dream and post-fordist neoliberal capitalism

the left has serious ideas than the right and address the fundamental economic questions more than the right, who are most often pro capitalist or focused on racial/social culture war issues

[Anonymous No.17204053]

>>17203988
Humans are egoist by nature but this doesn't mean free will exists. It's pure cope.

[Anonymous No.17204069]

>>17204022
>Marxist concepts are pseudo-scientific and vague.
Most political concepts are.

[Anonymous No.17204070]

>>17203499
Because lefties have been coping since the beginning of time.

[Anonymous No.17204099]

>>17203499
>What explains his enduring appeal?
There will always be losers. There will always be assholes willing to step on your head to get to the top, giving losers an excuse to believe that everyone more successful than they are is one of those assholes who stepped on people’s heads to succeed.
Envy and greed are a part of human nature. Ironically, the same kind greed that festers in places like Wall Street can be found at socialist meetings. The only difference is their bank account balance

[Anonymous No.17204119]

>>17203988
>What separates us from a herd of sheep or an ant colony is our individuality and self agency.

You really think humanity is no different from a flock of sheep or an ant colony?

[Anonymous No.17204120]

>>17204099
The socialist and the capitalist both center their focus around money and materialism. They place economics above all else.

[Anonymous No.17204122]

>>17204069
Including Marx's.

[Anonymous No.17204127]

>>17203981
You're completely out of touch with reality if you think he isn't seen as a sacred cow by many egalitarians, which is the claim I made. Even if you despise them, you shouldn't ignore them because that's the main numerical draw of Marx, outside of some Chinese being made to regurgitate a few empty slogans they don't believe in.

>>17203996
This is right and I don't know what the other anon is smoking. Probably self hating mutts that deflect their uneasiness on a wildly inaccurate view of their own country. The US are now a collectivist shithole like everywhere else, and have been so for long enough no one here remembers any other state of that country. Rand Paul also isn't Randian even in a journalist take, he's from a line coming out of the US founding fathers that has nothing to do with objectivism.

[Anonymous No.17204152]

>>17203499
>having been refuted long ago
no they haven't and you thinking and regurgitating that means you haven't read him and all your knowledge about him comes from second hand sources.

[Anonymous No.17204162]

>>17203499
Everyone hates him until they read him. Then they realize what they hated was merely a straw man.

[Anonymous No.17204167]

>>17204122
Yes very observant

[Anonymous No.17204171]

>>17203499
how many self proclaimed marxists actually read capital?

[Anonymous No.17204183]

[Anonymous No.17204198]

>>17204171
i have. also german ideology and critique of gotha program

[Anonymous No.17204205]

>>17204162
>>17204152
>the absolute state of marxists
If anyone reading Marx suddenly fell for his errors, how would there have been people against his theories in the first place?

[Anonymous No.17204216]

>>17204022
Are you even familiar with marxs concept of alienation?

[Anonymous No.17204223]

capital is a social construct, not a natural phenomenon
we can destroy it, and we will strive to do so

[Anonymous No.17204229]

>>17204205
Even in logical form your question has an obvious answer, which is that not everyone reads him (few living at any point ever have).
But also, the fact that you think everything he ever said was a priori an error is a dead giveaway that you have no intellectual conscience or curiosity.

[Anonymous No.17204244]

Zoomers never picked up a basic economics book. They think economic theory is some dry and uninteresting science, but it is actually quite interesting. I've learned a lot about human behavior from studying economics, and even a cursory study of basic principles of macroeconomics will disprove Marx for the childish utopian fantasy that it is.

[Anonymous No.17204256]

>>17204223
Pray tell, how will you destroy capital? Foolish cretin. You are an utter child with no grasp on economics or how the real world works. You must live a sheltered existence off the government's teet or your mother. I am disgusted to even be talking to you.

[Anonymous No.17204263]

>>17204216
Yes. It's meaningless bullshit.

[Anonymous No.17204265]

>>17204205
Most people read is the pamphlet called the communist manifesto and they usually don't even know the context of for whom it was written and what was happening then.

[Anonymous No.17204268]

>>17204256
That's what we need to figure out before its insatiable desire for growth strips us of all our resources and leaves us dead, like deer introduced to islands without predators who eat all the plants and then starve.

[Anonymous No.17204297]

>>17203877
>>17203888
Dubs and trips BTFO Marx

[Anonymous No.17204301]

>>17204205
Because the people that profit of the economical mode of production that marxs criticizes dont like that he wants to make away with the mode of production that they make millions of? Of course capitalist dont like when Marx explains capitalist exploitation and rev up the ideological machinery of capitalism to spread propaganda against it, look at McCarthyism
>>17204244
Bourgeois economics dont ever engage with historical materialism or surplus extraction, they dont dare to attack the basic principles of Marxs economic analysis, since they cant refute them. Marxs LTV comes from Adam Smith , he goes back to the economists before him and expands their concepts.
>>17204263
how so? I think it is quite accurate, the worker whose product he creates but is owned by someone else, is alienated from the product it engages with him in a sense that it is something that exists outside of him, even though he created it, he is thus alienated from
1) the product of his work
2) work itself since the product of it is only the materialised form of labour
3)himself, since work makes up the essence of all living beings
4)Nature, since work is an exchange with Nature, but nature itself seems to the worker as something seperate from himself, which is endlessly commodified.

[Anonymous No.17204302]

>>17203499
It appeals to the low common denominator that feels entitled to being at the top of the dominance hierarchy despite having redeemable qualities

[Anonymous No.17204304]

marxist leninism is the chemo to the capitalist cancer

[Anonymous No.17204309]

>>17204302
In the same way that abolitionist papers must have appealed to slaves, I'm sure.

[Anonymous No.17204326]

>>17204304
The Leninist concept of democratic centralism, state capitalism, and politiburo/nomenklatura representing new classes is an utter negation of the Marxian ideal of the proletariat controlling the means of production. Socialism is about liberating the iniividual and allowing them full ownership of the fruits of their labour, so therefore they must own the means of production and have direct democratic control

[Anonymous No.17204329]

>>17204223
Capitalism is objectively the best way to ensure that resources are accessible to the average person. Socialism and communism give unilateral control of all resources to the small group of people who float to the top.

[Anonymous No.17204333]

>>17204229
Ah yes, surely Pareto, Menger, Proudhon, Walras and Bohm-Bawerk didn't read Marx and just happened to write his name on paper.
>But also, the fact that you think everything he ever said was a priori an error is a dead giveaway that you have no intellectual conscience or curiosity.
You're one of talk about logical form when my post said "suddenly fell for his errors" which would only covers his errors, which could go from none to everything he wrote.
His errors are indeed many, but I fail to see how anything in my post is "a priori". Which I guess you mean as prejudice by the appeal to curiosity after, because some of his errors are a priori (while others are empirical claims). Absolutely nothing in my post indicated anything on reading or not this or that text of Marx. The only way you can infer that is by falling back to the claim that anyone that disagreed simply hasn't read him, which was the thing originally mocked.

[Anonymous No.17204353]

>>17204326
leninism is revolutionary praxis

[Anonymous No.17204360]

>>17204326
No, Socialism is not some moral, righteous, ideal. It is a mode of production that is born out of the contradictions of capitalism, the major one being that of societal production but individual accumulation.

Socialism solves this by societal production and societal accumulation.
Workers control all government bodies, electing administrative positions that are seated by the most educated communist does not constitute "new classes", it is a synthesis of marx analysis not antithetical to it

[Anonymous No.17204363]

What exactly is owning my labor? Mostly just working for myself and others? Marxist treat it as a truism but it seems rather vague

[Anonymous No.17204369]

>>17204333
Holy cope. Listen, you didnt read him, you dont like him, it's fine. He's right about some things and you're just gonna have to deal with that. It's not a big deal.

[Anonymous No.17204383]

>>17204363
Keeping the surplus value you generate and having a democratic say in the management of the workplace

[Anonymous No.17204385]

>>17204329
so, like capitalism?

[Anonymous No.17204387]

>>17204244
>Zoomers never picked up a book

Fix'd that for you.
Seriously, not even Marxists read Marx. Mao himself never really read Marx. Here's how Mao became a Marxist:

>In the winter of 1920 I organized workers politically for the first time, and began to be guided in this by the influence of Marxist theory and the history of the Russian Revolution. During my second visit to Peking I had read much about the events in Russia, and had eagerly sought out what little Communist literature was then available in Chinese. Three books especially deeply carved my mind, and built up in me a faith in Marxism, from which, once I had accepted it as the correct interpretation of history, I did not afterwards waver. These books were the Communist Manifesto, translated by Ch’en Wang-tao and the first Marxist book ever published in Chinese; Class Struggle, by Kautsky; and a History of Socialism, by Kirkup. By the summer of 1920 I had become, in theory and to some extent in action, a Marxist, and from this time on I considered myself a Marxist."

Imagine reading two books and a pamphlet and this being the thing that determines the course of your life. No wonder the man later wanted to exterminate sparrows. Complete imbecile.

>>17204301
>1) the product of his work

Yes, humans are alienated from external objects.

>2) work itself since the product of it is only the materialised form of labour

No, he actually works and is part of the work, both in capitalism and in any other system. You can't be alienated from the work you yourself are doing unless the concept of "alienation" is redefined ad hoc.

>3)himself, since work makes up the essence of all living beings

Work doesn't make the essence of all living beings. This is biologically and psychologically an imbecility. And no object is alienated from itself.

>4)Nature, since work is an exchange with Nature, but nature itself seems to the worker as something seperate from himself, which is endlessly commodified.

Define "nature" without including human beings in it. You can't. The romantic concept of nature is an aesthetic fiction; perhaps a very great one at that, but a fiction.
And no, nature doesn't "seem" (to whom? the worker? which worker? according to what psychological data and what replicated studies?) more separate in capitalism than in other systems.

Your very vocabulary is filled with vague 19th century abstractions that have no scientific value whatsoever. No different from an astrologer. Even if it had been good in its time it would be already quite dated.

[Anonymous No.17204394]

>>17204329
thats happening right now though

[Anonymous No.17204399]

>>17204383
What is my "surplus value" what if it isnt actually that valuable?

[Anonymous No.17204405]

>>17203856
It is not for us to refute but him to prove. Unfalsifiable ideology makes for poor science.

[Anonymous No.17204407]

>>17204399
It's called profit in nonmarxist terminology. It's appreciation (or "valorization") over and above costs.

[Anonymous No.17204415]

>>17204399
Imagine a worker who is hired for an hour and paid $10 per hour. Once in the capitalist's employ, the capitalist can have him operate a boot-making machine with which the worker produces $10 worth of work every 15 minutes. Every hour, the capitalist receives $40 worth of work and only pays the worker $10, capturing the remaining $30 as gross revenue. Once the capitalist has deducted fixed and variable operating costs of (say) $20 (leather, depreciation of the machine, etc.), he is left with $10. Thus, for an outlay of capital of $30, the capitalist obtains a surplus value of $10; his capital has not only been replaced by the operation, but also has increased by $10.

[Anonymous No.17204419]

>>17204329
Ahh yes, what a great allocation of resources!
Also:
>According to a CIA report released today (8 Jan, 1983)) both nationalities may be eatng too much for good health.
The CIA drew no conclusions about the nutritional makeup of the Soviet and American diets but commonly accepted U.S. health views suggest the Soviet diet may be slightly better.
According to Central Intelligence Agency, an average Soviet citizen consumes 3 280 calorious a day, compared to 3 520 calories for the America

[pip No.17204422]

>>17204326
took the words outa my mouth, aul chap..
the construction of marx ethnics is prime reason europe and the great kingdom are in trouble. failing genetical motivation they lure gonad shameful hate speech talks like the KKK. piercing through the hand of justice like a swift sarafice to the family.

modi, cash. pill by pill they swallow mevidian oak. like pillows at a welcome diner. caveing in only for the landlords welcome smile.

warming to a semi unbalanced gay bashing lover. food comes in from outside unless some pakui NN egro wants to o0en his trap about my ma again. ill fucking cream the cunt.

rich roses from a very piolot mab.

[Anonymous No.17204425]

>his ideas have been refuted long ago
they have?

[Anonymous No.17204429]

>>17204415
The capitalist answer to this is that the profit is accounted for by time. The owner fronts the capital, the worker is paid; the owner must wait, and a dollar tomorrow is not worth the same as a dollar today. Also, the owner owns the risks should there be loss instead of profit.

[Anonymous No.17204442]

>>17204369
I read the 18 Brumaire, the German ideology and the these on Feuerbach, plus the meme manifesto.
It was, I admit, so terrible in every aspect that I didn't bother with muh Kapital, which is the supposed holy grail. I'm a miscreant that was content with directly dealing with some side dishes. The taste was already overwhelming for my weak buds. Of course I had to be acquainted with the claims of the magnum opus from other books, but you'll reply only the precise words used by St Karl can convey the meaning (hope you didn't read translations btw).

[Anonymous No.17204444]

>>17204309
You are not a slave, just genetics are just not good enough to compete

[Anonymous No.17204449]

>>17204442
>hasn't read Capital
Lord, it's truly every time.

[Anonymous No.17204451]

>>17204394
No it’s not. We aren’t in a zero sum game.
When all resources are owned by the same person it is a zero sum game

[Anonymous No.17204459]

>>17204385
He said:
>the small group of people who float to the top.

In capitalism this "group" changes all the time, because of competition. The 100 richest of our day are not the same as the 100 richest of 1921.
And you need to be productive to rise to the top: you may hate Jeff Bezos, but he sure made my life easier and created a product that I use very frequently (Amazon is the only place where I can buy such books as those of Pynchon and William Gass here in my country; thank you, Bezos). This is because if capitalists are not productive they will fail and go out of business, i.e., they have "skin in the game", facing the consequences of their decisions.
Besides, this group has to abide by the rules of another group: the government.
In socialism, there is no "other group", no competition, no necessity of being productive: there is only the government. And the government does not abide by anyone else's rule save its own: Fidel, Maduro and Xi don't have to obey anyone. Nor do they pay the price for their actions: government officials tend to keep their jobs regardless of doing it well or badly. And the government doesn't go out of business.

Keep in mind that in real life neither of those systems exists in perfect form. Thus, you can have capitalism where the unproductive are sometimes rewarded with bonuses such as in the US (after the 2008 crisis), and socialism like that of China, which nowadays is quite a mixed system.
However, it is empirically - as well as theoretically - clear that capitalism (a better term is "free market") is better for the increasing of a population's wealth, as long as there is a secure, reliable judicial system (usually a state, though anarchists like David Friedman will say this isn't strictly necessary) in place which can provide both businessmen and workers with the framework of rules that is necessary for them to conduct their work in peace.

[Anonymous No.17204465]

>>17204444
I was agreeing with you, dumbass. People on the bottom of a hierarchy appreciate critique of that hierarchy.

[Anonymous No.17204471]

>>17204387
The product of your work is only an external object to you because it is owned by someone that is not you, under any other mode of production you largely produced for yourself, the clothing you had, the food you ate etc was largely produced by you. Only now we dont own the things we produce and give them to someone else.
>No, he actually works and is part of the work, both in capitalism and in any other system
No one said workers dont work, the point is, that since the product you create is alien to you, the process of working has to be alien too, since you do it for someone else, you can see this in how we perceive work as something distinct from living, we do it to live, to consume media, socialize etc, we dont see it as part of living but rahter as something to do to live, it is alien from our lives.

Nature meaning the resources that humans engage with to create commodities, in feudal times, where one largely lived as a peasant you saw that the things you own and created had their source in the sourrounding you live in, today we lost touch with the origins of commodities

Do you make the connection between the wrapped up meat in your supermarket and the living animals that this has been created from? Or have the origins of everything you own Pourposefully been distorted so we dont associated child labour with our Computer Screens and Phones?

[Anonymous No.17204473]

>>17204459
how would you prevent monopoly and government being controlled by private interests

[Anonymous No.17204486]

>>17204471
Are we not going to mostly consume products not made by ourselves in a socialist world?

[Anonymous No.17204545]

>>17204473
By voting.
Also, "private interests" in themselves are extremely contradictory: some businessmen support Trump, others support Hilary, there are even those who support Sanders, the Green party, or the libertarian party.
Regardless, in practice some private individuals will always have more influence than others in any political system. And not only economic influence, although this is the major one. There is also cultural and religious (which can be very, very, very big) influences.

And if you wish to prevent monopoly, then the best way is to reduce the government. Governments are the main creators of monopolies.
Jeff Bezos, for instance, doesn't have a monopoly: I also buy books from AbeBooks and Book Depository. However, even if he had, he would need to stay productive, otherwise - in a free market - other businessmen would steal his place, like others have done to Sears, IBM...

Meanwhile, the government of my country (not the U.S.) does have many monopolies, such as in the exploration of oil, regardless of how productive it really is. Anyone who tries to defy this monopoly by exploring oil on his own will go to jail. Meanwhile, if you try to compete against Bezos, you won't go to jail: the owners of AbeBooks have not been arrested yet, as far as I know.
Not that monopolies can't arise in the free market, I suppose they can, but in general they tend to arise from government creating restrictions and regulations.

[Anonymous No.17204547]

>>17204486
yes that true, since productive forces have developed to a point where seperation of labour is a given, this happened way earlier too and is a key feature of capitalism that remains in socialism.

In Socialism there also will be a kind of alienation remaining and there will also be a surplus that you create (now used to fund infrastructure, medical care, housing projects etc instead of going to the CEO of your company) so it is speculated while their still exists alienation, it is felt to a lesser extent than now, since it doesnt feed the deteroriation of your living standard but rather raises it.

Also if we speculate in a scenario where socialims develops further, production is so fast that everything you produce is also consumed by you,yes. So the table you produce, is your table, there is such an abundance of commodities that there is no need to allocate it differently.

[Anonymous No.17204574]

>>17204545
>>17204473
And just to complement: there is no reason to suppose "private interests" (rhetorical, commonplace words) to be any better than "public interests" (same).
The first kind consists in the interests of business owners in making more profits.
Th second kind supposedly consist in the interests of the people as determined by state agents, but this is sheer rhetorical fiction. In reality, "public interest" is nothing but the interest that politicians (elected by the public) have of staying in power. Thus, they can act against real public interest just as long as this does not harm their chances of getting reelected. This is why many politicians tend to act in *populist interests* rather than in public ones, making programs that are beneficial in the short run, but harmful in the long one.

[Anonymous No.17204758]

>>17204429
While uncertainty premium comes into the fray to determine what people sell for, the theory of surplus value is incompatible with more fundamental characteristics of action. Even a new idea that is sure to win (and thus carries no risk) would yield profit. The theory of surplus value ignores that there are different (in fact infinite) manners of choosing between uses of things. Profits (or losses) come from someone picking one of those possibilities, one that ends up with a different (better or worse as judged by the paying public) result than the previously chosen possibilities that had determined the prices of the factors of production (such as the leather and the work of the laborer). Entrepreneurship is impossible under the surplus value views. It is a (false) anti-entrepreneur doctrine even more than anti-capitalist. In socialist friendly parlance, you could say profit is the payment (positive or negative) for changing the structure of production (selling a new product, go for a different market, changing technological or organizational processes, etc).
Second, the point about time. We can enter semantic games, but interest is not typically counted as profit. It is indeed the price of time preference and advance on production, which would still exist even in the cyclical rotating economy. A constant interest, from constantly offering the same time advance, is not a change of the structure of production and isn't a profit or loss (there are none in a replicating rotating economy). Marxoids have a materialist view of production (time isn't hit-my-foot-on-it enough to them). They don't see that the (pure, independent of functions as entrepreneur or manager) capitalist is selling time, so they think he's stealing something. To sane people, interest on capital is one of the production costs.

[Anonymous No.17204760]

>>17204471
>under any other mode of production you largely produced for yourself, the clothing you had, the food you ate etc was largely produced by you. Only now we dont own the things we produce and give them to someone else

This is the most effective way to generate wealth.
And no, even in past societies the product of your work is external to you. It is another object, not a part of your body. If you "see it" as being a part of you, well, this is a psychological issue that varies from individual to individual. As far as I know, there is no scientific data proving that the distinction between "homo faber" vs. "animal laborans" is actually relevant or that it corresponds to the categories that have been drawn by Marxists in their armchairs.

>you can see this in how we perceive work as something distinct from living

We don't. Working is a part of life. Everyone knows this. What we see is work as being different from leisure (otium), and this has been the case since for ever, and always will be, unless you work with something that gives you pleasure, which most people don't, and can't, because society needs someone to plant the foods and clean the trash.
Work is, almost by definition, the opposite of leisure (otium).

>where one largely lived as a peasant you saw that the things you own and created had their source in the sourrounding you live in, today we lost touch with the origins of commodities

So? And even in Medieval times this wasn't always the case. You didn't necessarily know where your sword came from, nor did you know how the ancient bridges where made, or where the painter of the church (or of your portrait) got his paint from, or what techniques he used.
And even if you created a work you didn't necessarily know all about it. I doubt that Shakespeare knew how to make good paper. He probably bought it already made, wrote on it, then gave it to the printer. The result was the book. The only thing that Shakespeare knew was the writing.
The reason why our objects now seem less "natural" and more "artificial" is simply because they became more complex and it is cheaper to produce them in many different countries. You yourself are posting from a computer that probably could not be made using only the resources of your local city.

And, frankly, there is no reason why this is bad. You would need to spend a considerable amount of research to know where the things you use come from. This is annoying and completely unnecessary. This is just a Marxist, puritanical, Luddite fixation whose psychological relevance is yet to be proven - and even if it is psychologically relevant, one should control for those living in different conditions to see if it wouldn't be even worse if we didn't have these complex products that we do, and which make our lives easier.

[Anonymous No.17204791]

>>17203499
marx also had 7 children. explains why there were so many millions of neets killing each other for half a century.

[Anonymous No.17204795]

>>17203499
Enduring envy and resentment.

[Anonymous No.17204810]

>>17203499
Sorry deboonker, I know it's hard to open your mind, but if you learned the difference between voluntarism and determinism, you would know that Marx is a very unimportant figure, and would have remained so without politics and memes.

[Anonymous No.17204830]

>>17203808
>Chinese unity and community.
You have never been to China my dude

[Anonymous No.17204870]

>>17203499
>What explains his enduring appeal?
The fact that he was on to something. Incorrect in a lot of ways, but very, very correct in others.

[Anonymous No.17204878]

>>17204758
am i being trolled

[Anonymous No.17204938]

>>17204758
Amazon allows real entrepreneurs to develop products, and when they come to Amazon to sell them, Amazon allows it, sees if it's successful, and then just copies it and ranks their house brand above the original, effectively throttling the original entrepreneur out of his own idea. Also, Amazon dominates the retail space, meaning it is becoming harder and harder for independent entrepreneurs to reach their customers without Amazon.

Capital, by it's very nature, grows towards monopoly, and it is every businessman's interest to decrease competition, sabotage rivals, and defraud the public at every opportunity. The only counters to this (government, journalism, even unions) are all systematically being annihilated or co-opted. Dark times ahead in this corporate-capital hellscape.

[Anonymous No.17204959]

I guarantee anybody saying Marx is "refuted" ITT has never actually read Capital.

[Anonymous No.17204962]

>>17203499
you can't refute the truth. faggot.

[Anonymous No.17205122]

>>17204962
what truth? ussr is dead

[Anonymous No.17205157]

>>17203516
Capitalism exists because Marx claimed it exists.

[Anonymous No.17205185]

>>17203988
>>17204053
Brainlet take. Humankind was built thanks to group work and most important hierarchies.

[Anonymous No.17205575]

>>17203996
>>17204127
Randians were common in America among the boomer generation. You know the generation that ALLOWED the corporations to write the laws.

Pure objectivitsm doesn't exist in the US due to the impracticality of it but the base of modern neoliberalism is influenced by Rand among others.

[Anonymous No.17205635]

>>17203858
I wonder when a Chinese person goes and buys a copy of something the capital to what degree the party has been involved in its translation.

[Anonymous No.17205813]

>>17203988
>muh human nature
brainlet take

[Anonymous No.17205818]

>>17203499
Equality cults have been around for thousands of years OP, Marxism is just the 19th-20th century edition of it.

[Anonymous No.17205897]

>>17204938
Government is already a monopoly.

Also, Amazon is not a monopoly. You are free to start your business outside of Amazon. You won't be arrested if you do so.
The thing is that Amazon is extremely productive and good, so consumers flock towards it. I can tell you from first hand experience that their respect to consumers is extremely good (seriously): once one of my books took to long to arrive, so I wrote them an email, and they gave me my money back without me even asking them - I only wanted to know when the book would arrive. I was honestly amazed, because my country's companies tend to be a lot worse. Later the book did arrive and I still got my money, so it was essentially a free book.
Same happens with Google. It's really good. Duck Duck Go is there for everyone. But we don't use it. Why?

Even if "capital" created monopolies, it would be better to have a private monopoly than a goverment one, because private entities are easier to break (Sears, IBM, etc. were very big once, but not anymore), while breaking a government monopoly usually takes serious amounts of political action.

[Anonymous No.17205920]

>>17204465
My apologies, obviously my genetics are not enough to compete

[Anonymous No.17205955]

>>17203499
equality is a social construct

[Anonymous No.17205962]

>>17204008
So is the US. Your point?

[Anonymous No.17206017]

Capitalism and liberalism present themselves as the culmination of human progress. Pure freedom. Their ultimate goal is in reality rationalization of commodification and distilling all human interaction to pure economic value.

The revolution is not merely to take ownership the means of production, but to end the tyranny of money over humanity and our planet.

[Anonymous No.17206034]

>>17205897
Government owned industry is not focused primarily on profit and competition but rather providing for the needs of the people

[Anonymous No.17206095]

>>17203776
China is a fucking hellhole being propped up by Western capitalists. Xi Jinping is Winnie the Pooh. The Tianmen Square Massacre of June 4th, 1989.

[Anonymous No.17206106]

>>17204037
>it has given young people ideas about what they can do to achieve a better tomorrow
By murdering millions. Neat.

[Anonymous No.17206117]

>>17205897
>You won't be arrested if you do so.
That's not what a monopoly is

[Anonymous No.17206134]

>>17203499
>refuted long ago
When? By who?

[Anonymous No.17206136]

>>17203499
>His ideas
Such as?

[Anonymous No.17206148]

>>17206095
why do people keep calling him winnie the pooh?

[Anonymous No.17206158]

>>17206095
>The US has never committed massacres' or started illegal wars

[Anonymous No.17206168]

>>17203981
>He was explicitly not egalitarian
How are you defining egalitarian? Because he sure as hell thought class divisions should be erased. That is egalitarian in my book.

[Anonymous No.17206178]

>>17204036
Historical materialism is only correct in the scientific observations it makes. It's impossible to scientifically assert causal relationships, and this is where Marxist historicism falls extremely short.

[Anonymous No.17206190]

>>17206178
>and this is where Marxist historicism falls extremely short.
As well as becoming, essentially, speculative, unfalsifiable metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.17206198]

>>17206148
Its a chinese meme that got censored, he has a passing resemblance to Pooh's face in some photos
>>17206158
Whataboutism. The US does not practice re-education camps or forced organ harvesting on its own population. The US does not have state-enforced internet and print censorship. The US does not have the social credit system, has never had the One/Two Child policy, has never starved millions of its own people through ecological interference, etc etc.

[Anonymous No.17206223]

>>17206198
>The US does not practice re-education camps
Has in the past
> forced organ harvesting on its own population
Conspiracy theory spread by a crazy cult that believes aliens are promoting race mixing
>The US does not have state-enforced internet and print censorship
Instead the "private" sector does this
>The US does not have the social credit system
Instead it has a three strike system with forced labour
>has never had the One/Two Child policy\
So?
>starved millions of its own people through ecological interference
Ah yes the Communist party is responsible for the famine that was the last of its kind in China and had, before Mao, been a constant problem due to lack of industrialization.
Do you have any more American propaganda you haven't looked into to parrot?

[Anonymous No.17206227]

>>17203499
>What explains his enduring appeal?

Marxism possesses the messianic appeal of Christianity (of which it is the materialistic negative image of) combined with the mass appeal of (seemingly) championing values that became popular and easy to appeal to after the enlightenment, like rationalism, secularism, scientificity, and egalitarianism. It's the path of lowest resistance in a post-enlightenment world where both religious thought and anti-enlightenment sentiment became quite unpopular.

[Anonymous No.17206250]

>>17206223
Hilarious amounts of chink cope in this post. Don't spend your yuan all in one place, Wang.

[Anonymous No.17206272]

>>17203877
>this discussion repeated a million times in these threads
By people on /lit/ with neither the cognitive ability nor the reading background to properly refute it. Face it, no one on /lit/ is saying anything insightful.

[Anonymous No.17206277]

>>17206198
>The US does not practice re-education camps or forced organ harvesting on its own population.
not a thing, and it's been 2 years since this story came out and not a single piece of evidence has come since

>The US does not have state-enforced internet and print censorship.
who the fuck cares, social media has given people so much brainrot it's insane
> The US does not have the social credit system
I don't know what this is supposed to be attacking, I assume you think china has a social credit that is enforced on people which it doesn't.

>has never had the One/Two Child policy
wouldn't want them having more babies anyway, their population is big enough

>has never starved millions of its own people through ecological interference
none of those people exist in todays age so I don't really see how that's an argument

[Anonymous No.17206284]

>>17206272
please answer this
>>17206178
>>17206190
It's not a matter of "refuting" it, it's a matter of deciding whether it's worth any serious consideration at all in its deeper assertions.

[Anonymous No.17206316]

>>17206250
>cant refute what he's saying, must be cope

[Anonymous No.17206341]

>>17203902
you have clearly never read an ounce of marx in your life

[Anonymous No.17206349]

>>17203988
I used to love Marxism. Even voted for Sanders for communist president in the democratic primaries. I knew democracy was the only true path to a communist utopia. Like Marx said:

>Killing people and destroying property solves nothing. Democracy is the only road to socialism.

Used to read Marx daily. I must have scrolled through brainyquote.com reading ALL his quotes. Oh, I don't know what "human labor in the abstract" means WHO THE FUCK CARES. I don't know what "commodity production" means? Fuck off, you purists. Revolution isn't made by armchair theorists like you, sitting around all smug in your mom's basement nickpicking every little detail anyone gets wrong. It's made by DEMOCRACY when the PEOPLE come together and realize they can create something BETTER. A society created in our own image, THAT's what Marx was really fighting for. Assholes.

I started going down the wrong path. I started getting real deep into Marx, far down the rabbit hole. I found some works written by Marx, the really dark stuff. I started getting into his Theory of White Genocide. Quoted:

The White Man is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor he sucks.

I realized that the white man must be destroyed if we were to create a communist utopia. At that point I realized it was too great a cost to humanity, and realized my own path down insanity.

Started reading Mises, Hayek, Rothbard. The good guys. Learned about the sanctity of property. Learned about how to DEBUNK the labor theory of value with the mudpie argument. But most important of all, I learned baout INDIVIDUALISM and how Capitalism is really the best system for that.

I was like "Holy shit. When you get a job, you actually AGREED to sell your labor to him. Wild". Marx's arguments just fell apart.

But the nail in the coffin, for Marx? He forgot about human nature.

[Anonymous No.17206370]

>>17205897
>You won't be arrested if you do so.
>having no fucking idea what a monopoly is

[Anonymous No.17206773]

>>17204938
The question of monopolies has little to do with the previous question of surplus value and my previous post which was responding to it.
A lot of confusion in your post. If amazon (or whatever boogeyman you want to conjure) copies someone else doing something innovative, this is a good thing. You want whatever new ideas (deemed better by the people, hence profitable) coming up to be spread wide without obstacles. The opposite is precisely putting the innovator in a permanent rent extracting position. It is very strange to complain about monopolies by implicitly defending exclusivity grants, which are monopolies proper. Contrary to what retards like >>17206370 or >>17206117 say, this is the original and true form of monopoly, only in an improper sense is price inelasticity sometimes called monopoly price.
In the general context of the thread, it is also ridiculous to ask for socialism if your issue is concentration/integration, since even a few conglomerates dominating their respective segments of industry are infinitely more decentralized than government control. Replying with trite moralizing (especially false) like >>17206034 doesn't change that. Government isn't a "good monopoly" by transcending the oh so big bad profits. Not having to compete, and even worse, not seeking profit, means that they are not even trying to chose the structure of production preferred by free clients.
A saner and more consistent argument for curbing freedom would be to consider that the choices of free plebs are terrible, so you need a coerced direction of production. That way the elevated vision comes true in spite of not having spontaneous traction. This invasive elitist view at least wouldn't lie and shy away from asking for monopoly (for them).

[Anonymous No.17206783]

>>17203988
are we lobsters dr. p?