/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17236941]

I'm on chapter 15 of Capital right now. Everything Marx says makes sense. Has /lit/ read Capital? I recommend it for everybody; even if you aren't a communist, understanding Marx will make you a better capitalist. (I'm a lefty though)

[Anonymous No.17236991]

bump

[Blarty Hongo !WegkZP4tiw No.17237018]

>>17236941
I first read Das Kapital when working night shift at Walmart. In retrospect, that was the perfect moment for it.

[Anonymous No.17237100]

>>17236941
I'm reading Engels' Anti-Duhring right now. I've read excerpts of Capital from the Marx & Engels Reader and I have a copy now, bought it recently. Planning to read it front to back later in the year.

[Anonymous No.17237111]

Just so you know
Marx rejects everything you've read so far in volume 3

[Anonymous No.17237161]

>>17236941
A lot of it is really limited to its day though. It's no wonder postmodernists started to branch off.

[Anonymous No.17237188]

Marx? No, thanks.

[Anonymous No.17237400]

>>17237018
Kek

[Anonymous No.17237418]

>>17236941
Try to apply the "means of production" bullshit to today's instagram and onlyfans cellphone owners, you will see you are out of touch and outdated of reality.

[Anonymous No.17237952]

>>17236941

I will eventually read it after Ricardo, have done Smith.

[Anonymous No.17237959]

>>17236941
how easy it is to get through?
t. brainlet

[Anonymous No.17238298]

>>17236941
Why read Marx when I can read Keynes?

[Anonymous No.17238338]

>>17237418
This. Marx has no concept of scale-dependent and scale-free economies, which are crucial to understanding wealth distribution today.

[Anonymous No.17238782]

>>17237018
>>17237111
>>17237161
>>17237418
>>17238338
>enter marx thread
>legit discussion with minimal shitposts

nice

[Anonymous No.17238843]

>>17236941
>Everything Marx says makes sense

Everything every philosopher says "makes sense". You're a dumb reader if you think it means he's right.
It makes sense within the context of the book. However, if you stop and start thinking about possible counter-arguments - or if you stop and search what counter-arguments have historically being proposed - you will realize that it doesn't make sense anymore.

Think to yourself: what are the implicit believes within his system? Are they correct?

The mistakes won't be apparent in the book. You clearly can't think.

[Anonymous No.17240115]

>>17236941
Undeveloped theory of the state.

[Anonymous No.17240408]

>>17236941
The core principle is people having to pimp themselves out can't result in workable prices. General equilibrium analysis obviously can't explain labour markets.

>>17237418
Obviously landlords and such got big incomes still in Marxs day without having a share in any form of industrial enterprise, that's just another form of rental income.
Marx claimed the rate of return on real productive investments under capitalism would decline. That kindda did happen throughout the capitalism world and things were pretty grime by the 1970s but it was offset by China opening up to foreign investors in the late 1970s, the Chinese state allowed massive exploitation of their workers to occur which is the only reason that income is of any real value.
If you're claiming instagram and onlyfans disproves that capitalism as a system to organize social advancement hasn't come to an end that's questionable.

[Anonymous No.17240497]

>>17240408
> General equilibrium analysis obviously can't explain labour markets.

Why do you think that?

[Anonymous No.17240515]

Reading Marx has made me appreciate him more, but hate his followers (modern day communists) even more. None of them embody his work. They misunderstand it, and are generally intellectually and physically deficient.

In short, the problem with communism is communists.

[Anonymous No.17240516]

>>17238843
This. No one takes Marx seriously on economics, he has been DEBOONKED and eviscerated so completely

[Anonymous No.17240574]

>>17240515
yep.
It's been over 150 years already. Half of what Marx says is actually pretty good. However, it's just not relevant anything as a political ideology in itself. Thus, the communists cling to new and shitter philosophies every day, drifting further and further away from his points.

[Anonymous No.17240597]

>>17240497
Marx explains unemployment as a structural feature of capitalism obviously and doesn't think markets clearing is the general tendency, starting from the unrealistic idea seems stranger.

[Anonymous No.17240606]

>>17236941
>understanding Marx will make you a better capitalist.
Obviously. The paradox is that some shitty unread rightoids are Capitalists but don't know how Capitalism works. They see their business fail not because of the left, nor the State, nor the jews, but because they simply don't have the very basics of how Capital and Capital accumulation work.
I had some shitty natsoc friend that has started multiple businesses during the last ten years.
When we discussed about Capitalism, he told me: "for me, Capitalism is not Capital accumulation. This Capital accumulation thing is a jewish trick made by jews to make people believe that Capitalism is Capital accumulation".
Imagine being this srupid, and thinking this. No wonder why all his businesses fail, again and again.
Of course he won't read Marx, because supposedly, for him it's jewish propaganda, made to mislead the white christian.

[bumposter No.17240638]

>>17237188
refuted by Bukharin

[Anonymous No.17240673]

>>17237418
Productive and unproductive labor, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productive_and_unproductive_labour

[Anonymous No.17240706]

>>17236941
>tfw agree with a lot of left wing and Marxist philosophy but still think capitalism is the only realistic and pragmatic approach viable in the real world

[Anonymous No.17240721]

>>17240706
It was. Not anymore.

[Anonymous No.17240727]

>>17236941
Reminder if your critique of capitalism is grounded in instability, unfair rent distribution, or struggles between sociological classes, you're to marx essentially utopian & advocating for the sort of socialism the schumpeters of the world found reconcilable with capitalism. if you think the real meat of the problem is simply that surplus value extraction is unfair you'd be much better adjusted being a georgist or roemerian coupon socialist type, a lot less to figure out.
a critique of capitalism is properly grounded in all human life becoming through its embedding in commodity relations merely an appendage of unthinking capital sitting over us and brooking no escape.

[Anonymous No.17240737]

>>17236941
>>17240727
Marx reading list:

Brumaire
Manuscripts
Value, Price, and Profit
Gotha
Grundrisse
Capital 1, 2, and 3 (yes you need to read all of them. 1 is not self-contained.)

Further Reading:
Michael Heinrich's Introduction (note: not an introduction)
Heinrich's 3-4(?) volume biography of Marx that he is still writing (vol 1 is out)
Love and Capital (another biography)
Isaak Illich Rubin's Essays on Marx's Theory of Value
Time, Labor, and Social Domination by Postone
Value by Diane Elson
Workers and Capital by Tronti
Law and Marxism by Pashukanis
Notebooks by Gramsci
The Principle of Hope by Bloch
Arcades Project by Benjamin
The Production of Space by Lefebvre
The Making of the English Working Class by Thompson (also read his essay on time.)
Poverty of Theory by Thompson
The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James
Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State by Perry Anderson
The Essential Lenin
The Essential Stalin
On Contradiction and On Practice by Mao
Dialectical Logic, Intelligent Materialism, and The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital by Ilyenkov
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, I and IS Apparatuses, and Philosophy of the Encounter by Althusser
H and CS by Lukacs
Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility by Karatani
Eclipse by Gilles Dauve
What Was the USSR? Towards a Theory of the Deformation of Value Under State Capitalism by Aufheben
Reading Marx Politically by Cleaver
Marx's Inferno by William Clare Roberts
Moneybags Must Be So Lucky: On the Literary Structure of Capital by Robert Paul Wolff
In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution by Geoff Mann
Crack Capitalism by John Holloway
The Origins of Capitalism as a Social System: The Prevalence of an Aleatory Encounter by John Milios
Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason by Bonefeld
The 4 volumes of Open Marxism
There's No Such Thing as "The Economy": Essays on Capitalist Value by Samuel A. Chambers
Marx at the Millennium by Cyril Smith
Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx by Frederick Harry Pitts
The Dialectical Imagination by Martin Jay
Money and Totality by Moseley
The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume 1 of Marx's Capital by Bellofiore
The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood

[Anonymous No.17240754]

>>17236941
>>17240727
>>17240737
"Capitalism does not always get what it needs, including from capitalists, because capitalists do not necessarily do what capitalist society needs. Hence the needs of capitalism do not explain the actions of capitalists. Capitalists are not capitalism; they are themselves market-dependent actors within — which is to say, subject to — capitalism. This means in part that the needs of capitalism are a concept of limited explanatory power: needs can go unmet, breakdown is possible. “Interests,” as the economic sociologist Karl Polanyi explained, “like intents, remain platonic unless they are translated into politics by the means of some social instrumentality.” That is to say, how social needs are met is itself in need of explanation. That meeting of needs is heavily constrained by the weight of history and social forces — path dependency is real; people do not make history in the manner of their own choosing. At the same time, whether or not capitalism’s needs are met is in important respects a contingent outcome, taking place in historical time through the behavior of contending social actors — people do make history, using partial, situated, and fallible knowledge."
Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era by Nate Holdren

[Anonymous No.17240774]

Whenever Marx tries to be a legit philosopher is always a good read. When he tries to be a politician is when the cringe starts

[Anonymous No.17240836]

>>17240597
General Equilibrium does not state that markets will clear. It just provided us with tools to analyze what forces are at work in the economy.
Even long-term unemployment can be explained within GE as structural and natural unemployment arising as results of wage rigidities, unemployment benefits, efficiency wages.
You may disagree with these explanations, but it is untrue that GE does not explain it.

[Anonymous No.17240858]

>>17240606
It's not stupid do have a different conception of something.

[Anonymous No.17240881]

>>17240754
That is not marxism.

[Anonymous No.17241899]

>>17240836
>General Equilibrium does not state that markets will clear
That's the entire point. When you have a free market prices will automatically change so supply and demand meet and everything ends up being put to work in the most efficient manner. Obviously most economies haven't had forms of unemployment benefits, employers had next to no pressure to pay high wages and if those "rigidities" are just some sort of permanent factor than obviously there might be no automatic mechanism and you're framework is starting from flawed assumptions.