/lit/ - Literature

secret code for just fuck my shit up

Various ways of thinking that share the influence of Marx's interpretation of history, and understanding of politics.

Hegelian religion

A load of crap

>>7128836
This sounds redundant.

At the very basic, Marxism is the understanding that the one who controls the means of production is in power, and that the majority of people are not currently in power even though they should be.

>>7128814
Everything is oppression
Every single problem on the planet is capitalism fault
So let's kill all rich ppl
And then it will be peace on earth and everybody will be equal.

Marx wrote a number of critiques on the developing science of political economy, and ended up thinking it out so thoroughly that he rewrote the static view of subject v object in the context of social laws of motion

>>7128878
Fucking based

>>7128878

has never read a word of Karl Marx outside of the Internet

I guarantee it

>>7128814
>What is Marxism exactly?
Marxism is a related series of bourgeois ideologies and a number of proletarian praxes.

Most significantly, Marxism has been in a modified form the state ideology of a series of imperialist capitalist powers.

Second most importantly, Marxism has been the statified ideology of bourgeois liberals in academia.

These two tend to view Marxism as a science ("knowledge") or as a totalising bourgeois ideology.

Marxism has also been the bourgeois ideology of many proletarians, and some non-proletarians, who have sought however unsuccessfully a path to praxes through ideology.

Finally, Marxism has been one of the proletarian praxes of resistance to capitalism and towards the overthrow of the value-form.

This is, of course, a historical materialist account of Marxism, but what other accounts should we allow? Bourgeois idealist histories of ideas? Ha.

>>7128897
>implying most Marxists have even read Marx

>In professional economics, Capital was a detour into a blind alley, however
historic it may be as the centerpiece of a worldwide political movement. What is said and
done in its name is said and done largely by people who have never read through it, much
less followed its labyrinthine reasoning from its arbitrary postulates to its empirically
false conclusions. Instead, the massive volumes of Capital have become a quasi-magic
touchstone—a source of assurance that somewhere and somehow a genius "proved"
capitalism to be wrong and doomed, even if the specifics of this proof are unknown to
those who take their certitude from it. - Sowell

>>7128891
In other words?

>>7128878

This so much.: >>7128897

People have absolutely no idea what Marx actually conveyed. It's educated rational and formal. People have this image of Marx being some hipster from the 19th century rambling towards emotional appeal of the masses to assemble against the rich.

Marx is even a fucking proponent of capitalism since he considers it a vital step towards socialism.

This comes from the biggest Ayn Rand fan ever so that says a lot.

>>7128912
>arbitrary postulates
>empirically false conclusions

I can see Sowell hasn't read Capital either.

>>7128944
That's from his analysis and critique of Marxism and it is excellent. He himself was a Marxist once.

>>7128950
Marx sustains most of his postulates in length of the working day directly from empirical evidence.

All of the conclusions are borne out with Mandel's declining rate of profit OCC via expansion of the world system.

I really don't care how bad of a Marxist Sowell was, but his summary conclusion is as specious as an argument from human nature.

My bad, I should have said it like this

Everything is oppression
Every single problem on the planet is capitalism fault
So let's proletariat revolution the shit out of the bourgeoisie.
And then it will be peace on earth and everybody will be equal.

>>7128969
Read Marx's journalism on India and China tbh. Penguin has an edition.

The critique and transformation of existing society through a method in which the contradictions immanent to that society in ideal and empirical form are revealed and subverted through the combined movement of thought and practice.

Hegelian theory of history as a conflict of ideas reimagined as a history of literal conflict between the various haves and have-nots through history, presupposing that classes of similar people fight for their own interests, then justify their power through theory, rather than fighting in support of theory in the first place.

It's incredibly good at predicting revolutions (the French and American) that had already happened by the time Marx was writing. It's more debatable whether or not it was as good at forecasting the future of social and political relations, though I think it's better at that than most people would give it credit for.

I forget who said "vulgar Marxism explains 90% of economics in the world today," but I think that's about right. 10% is still a lot though (read Keynes).

>>7128966
The tendency of the rate of profit to decline is the only thing marx got right. But of course his conclusion was incorrect. Less profit to seek will lead to a more robust, entrepreneurial, independent sort of capitalism. We're seeing the beginnings of that in crowd funding.

>>7129516
>Hegelian theory of history as a conflict of ideas reimagined as a history of literal conflict between the various haves and have-nots through history
The concept of class struggle determining historical development wasn't inspired by Hegel, you dumb faggot. It was inspired by Marx primarily from Saint-Simon, and even then, as the Communist Manifesto readily admits, the concept existed even before the Communists appropriated it. Even while Marx took the concept from Saint-Simon, in taking it, he made it his own. The Marxian conception of class is a social relation of production dependent upon property relations and the division of labour. The agglomerate of all productive social relations constitutes the mode of production. It is through, in part, class struggle, that class relations change, and therefore as a fundamental relation of production, so does the mode of production and therefore class society as well.

What Marx borrowed over from Hegel was dialectics turned up on its head inspired by Feuerbach, which is a logical method in interpreting class struggle, and many other aspects of class society, and not class struggle itself. Often times when Marx employs dialectical 'laws', its usually after he (at least the Mature Marx) engages in conceptualizing an economic category, such as with quantity/quality on money*, for example. Class struggle is a fundamental feature of class society, and only a moron would reject it. Even then, it's only a logical method and nothing more. *Engels and the End of Classical German Philosophy

To quote Ollman, "With all the misinformation conveyed about dialectics, it may be useful to start by saying what it is not. Dialectics is not a rock-ribbed triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that serves as an all-purpose explanation; nor does it provide a formula that enables us to prove or predict anything; nor is it the motor force of history. The dialectic, as such, explains nothing, proves nothing, predicts nothing and causes nothing to happen. Rather, dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world. As part of this, it includes how to organize a reality viewed in this manner for purposes of study and how to present the results of what one finds to others, most of whom do not think dialectically."

(cont..)

>>7129670
When Marx constructs his theory, he constructs them purposefully with a specific vantage point. When he analyses the growth of capitalism, he analyzes it from the vantage point of today's capitalist society, and how we came to where we are today. Therefore, he presumes things to have happened that have lead to what is today, as necessary to the development to today, because without, what happened would not have. It's not a moral, nor a teleological imposition, not a consequence of some 'motor force of history' but out of the fact that, from the perspective of today, we would not have gotten here without these aspects of development. When he's trying to see are the 'laws of development', where he sees a specific process (social relation), and tries to abstract from them how they produce, reproduce, and change into other processes. From that he tries to construct, from the perspective of what is possible, what can be achieved with what we have available, not what WILL happen as a historical inevitability.

If you read 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, you may get the false notion that since Marx attributes class interests to specific political organizations and people, that either everything can be traced to class society, and that the classes in class society always have conscious class representatives. Unless you're deluded by the illusions of parliamentary 'democracy', it is plain to see that neither would be sufficient at first glance. But this is a consequence not of Marx's failure, but of interpretation. The only thing worse than an anti-Communist misinterpreting Marx is a 'Marxist' misinterpreting Marx. As stated before, Marx constructs his theory using specific vantage points, that he himself would admit to be one-sided, in order to concentrate on this or that specific feature of what he's analyzing. When he's analyzing class society, he's doing it in the vantage point and level of generality of class society. Only an idealist who assumes that perception is reality would say that therefore that everything can be traced to the struggle of classes.

(cont..)

>>7129671
Secondly, as said before, class struggle is something that is directly perceivable. It is not that the theory creates the movement, but the movement creates the theory. To quote from the Communist Manifesto, "The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes." and to quote from the German Ideology, "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." It's not the struggle of theory that manifests the struggle of classes, but the reverse. Communism existed before Marx, and if Marx never existed, it would still have, and so would Class Struggle exist without theory or organizations to guide it forward.

>>7128969
>dat excerp
Why do people have to write like fags. Why can't they just say what they mean

Marxism is the first time science has existed

Marxism is made up of at least 3 distinct projects and they aren't necessarily mutually interdependent:

1. A critique of political economy.

Marx developed a version of the labor theory of value that stated that exchange value was rooted in labor hours worked + the means of production.

2. A hegelian historicism prophesy.

Hegel believed that history had a clear beginning and end, dictated by the flow of the "world spirit" which played out in conflicts between historical forces and their eventual synthesis. Marx took the basic "form" of this argument but stripped it of its metaphysical or idealist elements and converted it into a theory about class warfare. This part of Marxism is mostly shit, although the idea that class conflicts underlie political conflicts has some limited validity (it's obviously not the whole picture though as it doesn't explain intra-class conflicts or seeks to explain them as front battles in a larger class conflict).

3. Political agitation for "communism," basically a hybrid ideology made out of elements of socialism and anarchism. Communism aims for the eventual institution of a classless, stateless society, but insists that the state must first expand and develop into a kind of welfare state before we get to the ultimate anarchist-like communist phase.

>>7128814
First off: Marx was a fucking historian. He's interested in describing human history mostly. Then he's a positive economist, which means he's only curious in DESCRIBING, not PRESCRIBING.

Then, if you take a sort of radical, idealist egoism like Stirner, then basically say "you can't consider property yours with any meaning, because power is material", then you get dialectical materialism which just says that literally everything in history can be understood by material conditions, even ideas. Then you displace morality by accepting Rousseauian human nature theory and say economics is bound to lead to Hegel's end of history via your materialist account.

Marx never suggested anyone do anything ever.

>>7128878
You're literally retarded

>>7129720
>Marx never suggested anyone do anything ever.

*directly

>>7128842
>that the majority of people are not currently in power even though they should be.

By what right? According to who's judgement?

This is like saying 'the majority of people aren't wealthy, even though they should be.' It's completely ridiculous.

>>7128912
Yeah except Piketty's Capital did prove that capitalism fails.

And quoting Thomas Sowell makes you look like a retard to everyone.

>>7128950
Marx wasn't a Marxist, so that suggests nothing about Sowell other than he may have sucked dicks for crack.

>>7128966
Literally it's impossible to talk about people without some idea of human nature.

Historical materialism.

Also guaranteed posts-ism.

>>7129671
So many logically connective statements are missing in your writing. Trudging through this pile of shit was a blast.

>>7129732

Why? Because Sowell points out factual inaccuracies in the works of hack economists like Picketty?

>>7129758
No because he doesn't, he makes stupid comments that sound like one-ups to retarded republicans who post it on 4chan and posture all day long about the socialism they can't even grasp intellectually.

>>7129762
If only every single argument about Marxism on 4chan wasn't about trying to show the targets of abuse are straw men.

>>7129762

Pretty sure Sowell is more than capable of grasping socialism, and of pointing out factual (i.e. data) inaccuracies in a book like Capital in the 24th 1/2 Century.

Also Picketty's conclusions are laughable. He claims to have proved that capitalism has failed, yet he is completely at a loss to account for the huge increase in general prosperity experienced by Americans in the 20th century or the immense economic difference between mainland China and Hong Kong.

>>7129777
>misunderstanding Piketty this hard

So we know for sure you have a second-hand understanding of two people. You care to proclaim your ignorance about anyone else?

best criticism against capitalism

>>7129785

I think I've understood him well enough to dismiss his conclusions. Maybe you should apply yourself to considering the weaknesses in his arguments. His central theorem about the rate of return on capital outpacing the rate of general growth isn't even mathematically correct.

>>7129777
This is possibly the weakest criticism I've ever read. A huge portion of the book is dedicated to exactly those ideas. Like your criticism runs directly in the face of reality

>>7129773
Stop being fucking stupid and misunderstanding shit and we won't accuse you of it. There's a billion good criticisms of socialism and Marxism but /lit/ right wingers miss all of them

>>7129812

Running in the face of reality seems to be a common failing of watered down socialists like Picketty. Income and wealth inequality are best addressed through competitive capitalism. They are widely a product of government intervention in the economy and government subsidizes. Try reading Basic Economics or Capitalism and Freedom, or Hayek's Road to Serfdom.

But wait, you won't read any of those, because you've already made up your mind about the world and who's right. So why don't you just stick your head back in the sand and be quiet.

>>7129831
Free market economics is utopian bullshit. You've already made up your mind on your ideas, and you twist and conform all data to make it work. Your views run directly in the face of reality: every country that has put free market economies into practice have led to disaster, and led to the deaths of millions. Or maybe your special, untested form of free markets has never been tested!

Piketty is not a socialist and argues in favor of free market efficiency, you fucking mongoloid mouth breather.

>/lit/ is for the discussion of literature. If you want to talk about politics, go to /pol/

Hmmm...

>>7129821
I'm saying exactly that. My wording was poor.

>>7129836

Free market? Utopian? Well I think that's nonsense, but if it's true, it's only because there are no means of keeping government out of the economy.

Communism is the real utopia, in that it is a dangerous fiction which has wrought untold harm upon the world. Socialism is not even possible with any kind of market economy. You can't transfer all the knowledge that is distributed across millions of people to a central authority and expect it to run things more efficiently or equitably. It is literally impossible.

>>7129869
>Free market? Utopian? Well I think that's nonsense [...]

If you will don't want an "ideological" view of why this is patently false to consider free market anything other than a device for charlatans, read something like pic. related

>>7129836

Oh please. The measures he recommends for addressing wealth inequality are completely at odds with the functioning of a free market. With respect to income inequality he's no better, failing to grasp (or what is more likely, choosing to disregard) the simply reality that so called rich and poor are not different people or classes of people, but very often the same people at different stages of their lives. For instance, Japanese Americans have much higher income than Puerto Rican Americans because they are on average 20 years older.

>>7129756
I rushed it in 30 minutes before eating breakfast. I go to /lit/ to try to refine my thought, usually after I read something. I'm not a good writer in the first place, so they tend to become confused messes.

Beyond the fact its not structured well, what's wrong with it?

>>7129884

And in all seriousness, if Paul Krugman is lauding a book about economics, it clearly belongs in the trash heap.

>>7129869

>Socialism is not even possible with any kind of market economy.

Depends on what you mean by socialism. Scandinavian countries (incidentally the best places in the world) have a hybrid, with regulated free market, massive taxes, and extensive welfare, called social democracy.

We absolutely reign supreme in terms of general amounts of happiness in the populace

>>7129831

>Running in the face of reality seems to be a common failing of watered down socialists

Did you just use the above to criticize the economist who is known for being among those that most extensively use empirical data in their work, instead of relying on armchair psychology and philosophical principles with no basis in reality (i.e., Friedmam).

>>7129670
>The concept of class struggle determining historical development wasn't inspired by Hegel, you dumb faggot.
hmm, well according to my dialectical analysis, your gay

>>7129889
>We absolutely reign supreme in terms of general amounts of happiness in the populace
That has more to do with the general lack of niggers and brown people in Scandinavia than anything else. That's is however changing. Have a good one, faggot.

>>7129893
>The concept of class struggle determining historical development wasn't inspired by Hegel, you dumb faggot.

Damn he really did say that. He's not wrong in saying there are a greater range of influences than others may be privvy to, but to cut in finality all connection of Marx's theories of history and Hegel...how can you convince yourself this is a fluent argument. In any case classical Marxism is horribly outdated and there's a lot of energy being spent right now spiraling the drain his body of work slid down quite a while ago.

>>7129899
>That has more to do with the general lack of niggers and brown people in Scandinavia than anything else. That's is however changing. Have a good one, faggot.

Wow didn't see this level of critical analysis coming out of a Hayekian xD~

>>7129889
>>7129869
there are also like a million models for pure market socialism because socialist dont have anything better to do than come up with ways socialism could work better than the Soviet Union

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/

>>7129869
So wait now the government is the sole holder of intellectual property?

U mad dumb son. But "government" is equivalent to "whoever has the most power", aka an ineradicable construct. So when you stop being such a baby utopian you can try reading socialist texts.

>>7129884
Free markets are a form of markets, not of structuring an economy.

For luxury goods they serve incredibly well. The problem is when basic necessities are priced into the market, because believe it or not, it's unfair to ask starving people to price food.

Also, it's quite literally impossible for the average consumer to have enough knowledge to compete with corporations. If you think information arbitrage don't real then look at American food packaging.

Why am I bothering talking to you?

>>7128814
>What is Marxism exactly?

A nightmare story, written by a man who hated humanity.

>>7129899

This is a reasonable discussion /pol/. You have no place here.

>>7129911
>unlike capitalists economists

Kek fucking moron

>progressive tax systems are literally socialism

Why are right wingers so insufferably fucking retarded

are there any good leftist /lit/ irc channels active

>>7129926
I'm a socialist dude. All I'm trying to say is: when you're not in power, you spend a fuckton of time coming up with all the different possibilities of what you might do when you are.

>>7129922
Marx wasn't a misanthrope, and none of his writings were misanthropic.

>>7129891
Of course they did

>implying right wingers actually read and comprehend Piketty, instead of insulting him as a socialism

Even the actual """academic""" criticisms are pathetic. The right wing is rather using the "ignore and forget" strategy

Rather, I would think poor right wingers are secretly faggot cuckolds. That's the only possible explanation for why they like sucking rich dick

>>7129938
Economics is the study of these models. What I'm saying is it's not a criticism because what socialists do is what economists do.

>>7129955
The way economic history is handled between orthodox and heterodox economists isn't really all that similar, despite a nominal common ground...

>>7129955
Eh, I think you're missing the point. Mainstream ("capitalist"/"bourgeois") economists mostly try to model existing systems, hence DSGE models and such. The socialist economists I was referring to in that post are trying to create new models of working economies to implement, which is pretty different.

Studying the system you have (and want to have) is pretty different from studying the system you want to create.

>>7129964
Pretty sure there are shitloads of economists working in right wing think tanks to shit out policy for American legislation

>>7129936
So that's a no

Would anyone be interested in starting one up?

>>7129983
Yes, that's certainly true as well

>>7129999
You're probably right though, socialists generally lean toward normativity and capitalists toward positivity

>>7129953
your future won't happen

Hegelian tautology in the form of "X".

>>7128814
it's an interpretation of history that focuses on the nature and division of wealth. don't listen to these reddit drift-ins.

>>7129891

>Austrian School economist Robert P. Murphy challenges many of Piketty's empirical findings and think that these may actually be the book's greatest weakness.[59] In particular, Murphy alleges false figures for minimum wages and tax rates, missing data points and data that have been merely constructed. In his judgement, Piketty cherry-picks those data which sustain a preconceived narrative.

>>7128814
Economic illiteracy.

>>7131259

Murphy didn't read the appendix, nor Picketty's addendum addressing accusation of cherry-picking, apparently.

>>7128814
Marxism is mankind's boldest attempt to get a handle on the totality of history. Too bad it didn't quite work out. Maybe next time.

>>7131770
/thread

I'm pretty sure the only people who defend Marxism are high schoolers and English majors

>>7129650
Beginnings... where?

>>7131795

Pretty sure you're on the wrong side of history, cretin.

>>7128878
Nietzsche is responding to a very specific form of socialism here, one that has had no political traction over the last 50 years. I wouldn't expect you to have read enough to understand that a huge amount of later 20th century continental theory reconciles Nietzsche with an anti-capitalist radical politics. The core of Marx's work isn't theory of communism but the analysis of how capitalism functions. You probably have no idea what shit like commodity fetishism and primitive accumulation mean.

>>7131855
>Killing fields
>Holodomor
>Right side of history

Kill yourself red.

>>7129730
F-f-fuck you!!!
>>>/pol/

you guys do realize Marx is literally the most influential writer in the history of humans right?

Perhaps the only two other most influential people, although they wrote nothing and just got famous because of their followers, were Siddhartha Gautama and Jesus Christ. But really Marx pretty much did it on his own.

notice how every marxist is just some edgy kid from a totally capitalist country, "but if only people would completely forgo human nature and fulfil my utopian ideals!!"

>>7133605
notice how the trolls use "human nature" as a bait word

why do marxists want equality between people, don't they understand that 99% of the 'proletariat' are uneducated morons who will never read 'Das Kapital' or understand even basic Marxist concepts? When you launch a revolution for these people, they're just going to take over and wipe out anything of value, including all you 'literary' idealists, then who will pilot the new communist juggernaut to some bullshit post scarcity state hmm? no one, and you'll revert to a dictatorship, because you've created a huge apparatus that has huge amounts of power over its citizens, including the power to dictate what you 'need' and how everything should be distributed, have fun living in your communist kennel before cletus takes you to the city limits and shoots you in the back of the head

>>7133634

the ideology is uncontainable

>>7133660
ze ideology

>>7131855
>Every communist country collapsed or is collapsing
>Communism is synonymous with brutal totalitarianism and genocide
>"Y-You're on the wrong side of history, they weren't REAL communists"

>Marxist thread.

>Retards that can't differentiate communism from central planning
Check
>Retard quoting Sowell
Check
>Human nature
Check

Good job /lit/.

>>7131855
Communist aesthetics are shit, show me triumphant Romanesque legions and Greek heroes, then you've got yourself a proper cult. All you get with Communism are creepy looking propaganda posters and stupid hungry peasants and weak faggots with their Mosin Nagants.

>>7133690
>responding to a pic from the spanish revolution, which was sabotaged by stalin, as if the poster was stalinist

>1944+71
>marxshits defending their egalitarian fantasy

mfw

>>7128814

-isms are policies applied to a society. A society can be made up of many -isms.

Marxism is the name given (usually by detractors of socialism and communism) to socialists and communists who want to apply theory's and predictions of Karl Marx.

That is the most honest application. A more dishonest one is the same people applying it to people and policies which are just good government, socialism, etc. Scare word.

>>7133879

It's like using the word "Darwinsm". It doesn't exist. It's used as a scare word to demonize evolution. Just like Marxism is used to demonize socialism or communism.

>>7133883
>>7133879

except both those words literally do exist, and have attached cultural social and political connotations

>>7133697
Nigga wat.

>>7128814
A meme