/lit/ - Literature

>>15330775
yo nigga fuck that right wing bullshit shit nigga get the fuck out here! This be a left wing board nigga! Read Marx nigga!

>dude this recipe has shit ingredients
>no I will not read the recipe! i just know it's bad despite being wildly ignorant of cooking and getting my kitchen skills from within

what did he mean by this

>>15330775
Marxism, like all religions, is unable to see past itself. Like all religions it simplifies and distorts things until they can be more easily understood.

>>15331044

>Every single cook who has ever tried to cook this has poisoned their entire clientele.

>Maybe the recipe is wrong?

>How dare you!

I once talked to a righty loser who unironically said "Marx's diagnosis of society was good, but his proposed cure is worse"

Yeah there are plenty but almost none of them are the arguments you'll see on here. Read about the schism between the Anarchists and Marxists in the first international, or just Anarchist critiques of Marxism in general. Walter Benjamin gave a scathing critique of historical materialism but nobody reads him outside of comp lit courses anymore. There's also a never-ending battle between Dialectical materialist and hegelian idealists. And lastly there's constant infighting between Marxists on different interpretations/rejections of Marx.

>>15330775
Sometimes they say "You should read beyond Marx. A lot of criticism, debate and refinement has developed in Marxist thought in the past 150 years"

>>15330775
Every single 'critique' ive ever seen comes form 'disproving' a misunderstanding. A common liberal trick.

His labor theory of value was wrong. He probably would have retracted some of his opinions if he had lived long enough to see them implemented.
>>15331059
>try to make recipe
>get sanctioned

>>15331079
Thats just a right wing trick to try and appear reasonable. Anyone who 'concedes' anything but does not update their own world view in the process is simply giving hollow concessions to try and make them look wise and well informed.

>>15330775
marxoids don’t read marx so they’re free to imagine that his writings ackshyually contain retroactive refutations of everyone who ever said mean things about him

>>15331113
>His labor theory of value was wrong.
no, what liberals misrepresent it as is, of course absurd becuase it is designed to be so.

>>15331126
Elaborate

>>15330775
>okay, i read the manifesto and...
>NOOO THAT ISN'T REAL MARX

Who offers the best critique of historical materialism?

>>15331117
Why should the other person "update" their world view?

>>15331133
Firstly liberals intentionally conflate value and price as the same thing. They then bring out the 'mud pie' argument, when nobody has ever claimed but them that marxists think idle useless labor creates 'value'. Now, today, we see liberals going off the deep end with king liberal: bill gates, actually proposing some kind of cryptocurrnecy based off of labor, which would effectively bring mud-pie making into existence as a generator of value. The liberals have memed themselves so hard they are now going to try and find solutions for their neoliberal dystopia in what they have convinced themselves the ideas of the socialist really were!

>>15331124
Marxism is not economics, or politics, it is philosophy. It is a method of thought which does in fact contain everything because anything it does not explicitly contain can be generated through its processes of reason. Any criticism against marx then, automatically exposes its lack of understanding since the arguments against what ever they are criticizing would have been apparent.

>>15331155
If your view on anything at all has changed it will have subtle repercussions on everything else.

>>15331161
I meant that labor doesn't determine a commodity's value at all, irregardless of whether it is useful or not.

Indeed all attacks have been through intentional misrepresentation.
Another classic you see people making even today was addressed over a hundred years ago, but they still repeat it.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/mar/11.htm

>>15330775
Duh, Marxists have been critiquing Marx since Marxists existed

>>15331161
Just because labor for something is more difficult doesn't mean it has more value. Diamonds are not worth more than water because it is harder to get diamonds.

Isn’t Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism a fairly well-known, renowned critique?

>>15331161
>bill gates, actually proposing some kind of cryptocurrnecy based off of labor
That's literally bitcoin mining already.

>>15331215
That's a pretty extreme statement. Labor intensive goods and services are sometimes highly valued BECAUSE of the labor intensiveness. It becomes a status symbol. Portraits, for example, are objectively inferior to photographs but they still function as a display of wealth and are valuable as such.

>>15330775
I don't even like Marx but this is a fucking hilarious thing to complain about

>>15331117
Today Marx is essentially just a toolbox, so accepting marxist analysis of capital doesn't necessarily make you any closer to the left or marx himself (case in point, Nick Land)

>>15330775
Yes, there is nothing more ridiculous than people telling you to acquaint with a thing before critiquing it

This board is getting more retarded every day

He got base-superstructure backwards.

>>15331161
>it is philosophy
>Any criticism against marx then, automatically exposes its lack of understanding since the arguments against what ever they are criticizing would have been apparent.

>self-sealing fallacies are philosophy

>>15331308
>Portraits, for example, are objectively inferior to photographs but they still function as a display of wealth and are valuable as such.

The ability to produce photographs of any kind far exceed their demand (more specifically, they can be created *on* demand). The labor intensity of portraits limit the amount that can be produce within a given time frame. The demand and supply are therefore both fairly low leading to their increase in value.

>>15331345
Could you elaborate on this? and/or provide writings that address this?

>somebody creates a theory
>some other guy finds something undermining theory
>"dude, why can't you just read the theory"

>>15331288
You are conflating value and price again, reflexively, because your liberal indoctrination.

>>15331354
>The ability to produce photographs of any kind far exceed their demand
Indeed, because making a picture requires very little labor

>>15331360
Material relations must be represented before they can have functional existence. Read the post-structuralists and contemporary anthropology.

>>15331375
Have you watched any actual high level philosophical debates anon? Do you realize the silly things they talk about? Its all just considering weird unprovable ideas and then calling it a draw. The winner was who ever made the audience fall asleep less.

>>15331380
>Indeed, because making a picture requires very little labor
... which increases supply but not demand.

>>15331380
What's the difference and why does the LTV make for a better explanation of value than marginalism?

>>15331394
>value is how in demand something is

>>15331380
People wanting a good or service makes it valuable though, not just the labor you put into it, which is what the other anon is saying. Supply and demand. I can spend 100 hours making fart noises on my computer and mixing and mastering them in the most complicated ways but that doesn’t mean people will rush out and buy my mixtape or that I should be compensated for it because of how much work I put into it.

>>15331403
>>value is how in demand something is
Relative to its supply, yes.

>>15331413
>>15331432
These are still conflating value and price.
Value has nothing to do with price. The only way the two are related is if price is lower than value a thing just wont be produced, typically.

>>15331308
>Portraits, for example, are objectively inferior to photographs
Look out we got a bug man over here.

>>15330775
Marxists are the biggest critics of Marx. Philosophy should be treated as a science not a dogma

>>15331472
Elaborate and suggest some literature.

>I have a right to state an opinion on something I didn't even read
Such a brave american statement

Economic ones, probably not. But there’s plenty of room to criticize Marx for the underlying metaphysical positions of his system.

>>15330775
We accept the critique that nothing he came up with was original, he was just repeating what always has been known through philosophy or religion

His economics are mostly bad. His sociology is good. His theory of history is good. His politics are bad.

>>15331500
Here i will quote an overview from engels.

>We all know that at the beginning of society, products are consumed by the producers themselves, and that these producers are spontaneously organized in more or less communistic communities; that the exchange of the surplus of these products with strangers, which ushers in the conversion of products into commodities, is of a later date; that it takes places at first only between individual communities of different tribes, but later also prevails within the community, and contributes considerably to the latter's dissolution into bigger or smaller family groups. But even after this dissolution, the exchanging family heads remain working peasants, who produce almost all they require with the aid of their families on their own farmsteads, and get only a slight portion of the required necessities from the outside in exchange for surplus products of their own. The family is engaged not only in agriculture and livestock-raising; it also works their products up into finished articles of consumption; now and then it even does its own milling with the hand-mill; it bakes bread, spins, dyes, weaves flax and wool, tans leather, builds and repairs wooden buildings, makes tools and utensils, and not infrequently does joinery and blacksmithing; so that the family, or family group, is in the main self-sufficient.

>>15331546
The little that such a family had to obtain by barter or buy from outside, even up to the beginning of the 19th century in Germany, consisted principally of the objects of handicraft production — that is, such things the nature of whose manufacture was by no means unknown to the peasant, and which he did not produce himself only because he lacked the raw material or because the purchased article was much better or very much cheaper. Hence, the peasant of the Middle Ages knew fairly accurately the labor-time required for the manufacture of the articles obtained by him in barter. The smith and the cartwright of the village worked under his eyes; likewise, the tailor and shoemaker — who in my youth still paid their visits to our Rhine peasants, one after another, turning home-made materials into shoes and clothing. The peasants, as well as the people from whom they bought, were themselves workers; the exchanged articles were each one's own products. What had they expended in making these products? Labor and labor alone: to replace tools, to produce raw material, and to process it, they spent nothing but their own labor-power; how then could they exchange these products of theirs for those of other laboring producers otherwise than in the ratio of labor expended on them? Not only was the labor-time spent on these products the only suitable measure for the quantitative determination of the values to be exchanged: no other way was at all possible. Or is it believed that the peasant and the artisan were so stupid as to give up the product of 10 hours' labor of one person for that of a single hours' labor of another? No other exchange is possible in the whole period of peasant natural economy than that in which the exchanged quantities of commodities tend to be measured more and more according to the amounts of labor embodied in them. From the moment money penetrates into this mode of economy, the tendency towards adaptation to the law of value (in the Marxian formulation, nota bene!) grows more pronounced on the one hand, while on the other it is already interrupted by the interference of usurers' capital and fleecing by taxation; the periods for which prices, on average, approach to within a negligible margin of values, begin to grow longer.

>>15331514
What makes Marx interesting is just how many different thinkers’ ideas he managed to bring together in a single coherent system. It real is a remarkable achievement.

>>15331546
>>15331556
Actually you know what, the whole thing is too long to quote.
Here
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/supp.htm#law
Engels response to various attempts at criticism. I was trying to quote selected parts to make the reading easier but this is /lit/, so knock yourself out.

>>15331472
I think you’re conflating value with labor. Something can be labor intensive and also not valuable, as the fart mixtape example I suggested

>>15331592
If the fart mix tape suddenly became highly desired, then the amount of labor that goes into creating them would certainly come into play when people try to figure out their price.

Value is not price, it is not labor, it is something else. Ultimately it tends to factor into price, and it is ultimately derived from labor.

>>15331539
His metaphysics: retarded

>>15331605
I see, thank you for clarifying the definition of value, then is your argument that price should be aligned with value, so that people can be compensated for the value they bring to society?

>>15331755
There are no shoulds, only how things are and how they will be.
It is a feature of capitalism that price and value are not the same thing, it wouldnt function otherwise. In the next relation of production there is no price at all in the market sense of price, and so it doesnt matter too much. Finally, in the relation of production after that, things will go back to mainly being small self sufficient communities where any ancillary trade or barter that needs to be done will in fact return to something similar to what i did quote as engels explained barter. In this case value will be important for trade, but even then people do not act like perfect logical machines so the 'barter price' of things will be different from the value.

Remember economics, in a broad sense, is not in isolation. Marxism is about the whole of society. Value as a concept would be more or less useless to someone wanting only to try, in a vacuum, to create some sort of idealized exchange system. But because society grows out of its material conditions, things like this have much further reaching implications than their direct impact on trade.

So far the only post in this thread that got my attention at all was the person claiming modern anthropologists have some argument against it. As indeed an 'economist' trained in the west would simply be out of their league when approaching the question to start with. An anthropologist making new arguments about the entire structure of society however might have something interesting to say.

>>15331788
>So far the only post in this thread that got my attention at all
the pretentiousness wafting off of this post

The thing that defeats Marx is Marx.

>>15331215
how does anybody pay for a commodity without money to do so? and how do they get that money