/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14544937]

Alright /lit/, a full-throated critique of this fucker is going to take more legwork than I originally thought. Tried reading Capital 2 years ago and knew I was wasting my time trying to get into this with zero economics background. Here is the reading list I put together for this year:

As groundwork (no not grundrisse lol) for Capital -

Adam Smith - Wealth of Nations (going with Eamonn Butler's condensed version because ain't nobody got time for the 1000-page original)
-David Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy
-Perhaps the early utopian socialists ie Proudhon? although Marx did not seem to be particularly influenced by them
-Sowell's Basic Economics cuz it's here on my bookshelf (I have already read his Marxism and intend to come back to it when this is all done)
-Obv Capital itself, with all the help I can get and hopefully by now some understanding of Smith, Ricardo and modern economic theory
-Early 20th century refutations by Sombart, Mallock, and Bohm-Bawerk
-Austrian school responses - Mises' "Socialism: an Economic and Sociological Analysis", Hayek's Road to Serfdom
-Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
-Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism if I can ever find it in a goddamn library
-Skousen's Naked Communist (I have read this book has some issues with sources and citations so it's not high priority)
-Archie Brown's Rise and Fall of Communism to study actual commie regimes and how they implemented Marx's ideas (or didn't)
- A few other modern odds n' ends - Gottfried's Strange Death of Marxism and Lise Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women to see the unholy birth or Marxist Feminism

How's this look anons? Any obvious duds in the list or crucial omissions?

[Anonymous No.14544949]

just take an economics class you jackass

[Anonymous No.14544958]

>>14544937
You could replace all of those with Hegel
Marx is literally entry level economics, every macro class has you read him

[Anonymous No.14544965]

Tbh you'd be better off just reading the first volume (not that long) of Kolakowski on Marx/Engels specifically, then reading Marx semi-chronologically and reading Capital alongside Harvey's companion (in either its youtube or book form, and keeping in mind Harvey is giving a particular interpretation that is not universal to contemporary Marxists)

Harvey will do much of the work of giving you the necessary grounding in the French utopian socialism and British economics that everyone cites as two of the three wings of Marx's influence, and Kolakowski will do a reasonably good job of introducing you to the third Hegelian wing.

Then you can peruse the rest at your leisure, or go do more specific reading in Marx's influences as you like. This way though you at least end up reading him very quickly.

t. right wing but like Marx a lot, in case someone calls me a discord tranny.

[Anonymous No.14544998]

>>14544937
If you're not interested in economics, then skip Capital and read other books by Marx, something like his 1844 manuscripts or his political writings (civil war in france, etc.. i can make a list if needed).

However, if you DO insist on having a thorough economic formation, then I recommend doing the next:
1) Familiarize yourself with standard and conventional economics. If you know 0 about econ., then this is the best place to start. They'll explain how markets supposedly work, a little bit of micro and macroeconomics, etc. In short, they're the fundation for anything else you want to read. I recommend Macroeconomics by Mankiw. Don't get into microeconomics, it's a waste of time.

2) Read Adam Smith and Ricardo if you want to, but Ricardo is veery hard. What I would do is reading them along a good book on history of economics. I recommend Isaac Rubin's "A history of economic thought", you can get it on Libgen. Also Maurice Dobb's book "Theories of value and distribution since Adam Smith". Read them along with Smith and Ricardo, otherwise you won't be able to understand them by yourself if you know 0 about econ., especially Ricardo (Smith is easier).

4) After this you're good to go to Marx. You could start by reading his short phamplets: "Wage labor and capital" and "Value, price and profit". Then go with Capital. Capital itself it's a fucking world. There's hundreds of books about the book. The book is fairly easy after chapter 3, though really long and dense. But it has fascinating parts. I recommend Rosdolsky as auxiliary bibliography. Also new authors like Christ Arthur or Simon Clarke. Don't even bother with Althusser unless you're interested in historiography, he said some really dumb and outdated shit.

4) Read Sombart, Bohm-Bawerk and other austrians if you want to. I recommend a great book by Wicksell: "Lectures on political economy". It gives a brief summary of the previous theories of value and then outlines subjective theory of value in a neoclassical framework.

>t. right wing but like Marx a lot, in case someone calls me a discord tranny.
Same here bro. I love reading Marx, I always find him stimulating. For a time I thought I was a marxist and I got into a local communist party, but then I realized that I'm too right wing and socially conservative for that. It's just that nobody explains the actual world better than Marx, but I never could swallow his dogma of progress and his teleological propositions. He's a child of enlightenment and I can't stand that.

[Anonymous No.14545006]

>>14544998
Forgot that my last paragraph was a reply to >>14544965

[Anonymous No.14545031]

>>14544937
>economics
Please don't waste your life like this.

[Anonymous No.14545066]

Don't critique Marx's economics. You're wasting your breath. You should critique dialectics. Too bad for you though, Nietzsche did this far better than you could. And regardless Marx survives Nietzsche because class emancipation ideology being an amoral expression of will to power is perfectly fine too.

[Anonymous No.14545134]

>>14544937
>full-throated critique
why bother, Marxism is irrelevant outside of the humanities and soft social sciences. the rest of the world has moved on, most professed Communists haven't even read Marx anyway, they're either sentimental progressives or third-world nationalists

[Anonymous No.14545156]

>>14544937
>Tried reading Capital 2 years ago and knew I was wasting my time trying to get into this with zero economics background.
you can do it. All you have to do is understand the first two chapters and the rest all falls into place.

[Anonymous No.14545161]

>>14544949
>just take an economics class you jackass
that won't do shit for him. they teach a completely different economic theory now. You won't hear "labor theory of value" one time in an econ101 class.

[Anonymous No.14545197]

>>14545134
Yes and it's not like the humanities and soft social sciences are taking over the world or anything

Are you living under a goddamn rock anon?

>>14544965
DESU I didn't find Harvey's commentary particularly insightful or illuminating. I did watch his lectures up thru ch. 3 which is where I fell off on my first attempt (alongside everyone else)

Obviously I am aware Capital is not taken seriously as a work of economics, however after those first 3 chapters I came away thinking there were far too many references to earier Smith / Ricardian concepts that were going over my head so maybe I should have read them first

There are plenty of non-economic approaches to Marx in the book list in my OP

[Anonymous No.14545199]

>>14544937
If you can’t understand basic economic concepts like value and commodity you’ve got to be borderline retarded. Marx is pathetically easy to read and comprehend, and when you do read him, you’ll realize how much insipid commentary he has on the most rudimentary of concepts. Marx essentially goes full jew by inundating you with a deluge of concepts that you can’t particularly critique just how off base his whole system is. Just keep in mind, Marx based his whole theory off of history being an economic conflict above all other forms.

[Anonymous No.14545367]

lmao who started "full-throated"?

[Anonymous No.14545386]

>>14544937
Instead of wasting your time why not just read an econ textbook and do the practice problems. Aside from historical curiosity or literary value, there is no point reading Adam Smith or Marx or Ricardo. Learn some stats instead and you will come much closer to understanding how economics is today.

[Anonymous No.14545407]

>>14545197
>Yes and it's not like the humanities and soft social sciences are taking over the world or anything
they aren't

[Anonymous No.14545416]

>>14544937
On War by Clausewitz was also very influential for Capital.

[Anonymous No.14545449]

>>14545197
>Yes and it's not like the humanities and soft social sciences are taking over the world or anything
this is a manufactured distraction from the technological take over

[Anonymous No.14545463]

>>14544958
Things an American will never say.
This is a good aspect of our education system.

[Anonymous No.14545479]

>>14544937
>Sowell's Basic Economics

[Anonymous No.14545574]

>>14544937
why does everyone on this board need an entire of catalogue worth of prep for every single book, just read things, and if you get stuck on something look it up online

[Anonymous No.14545643]

>>14545574
No one here actually reads

[Anonymous No.14545710]

>>14545574
Knowing the answer and understanding what to do with it are two entirely different things. Don't let others do the groundwork for you if you don't want to be led astray.
>>14544937
A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism
The Economics and Ethics of Private Property

Both by Hans Hermann-Hoppe

[Anonymous No.14546040]

>>14545161
Good. It's a stupid theory.

>>14544937
add more Sowell, his thoughts on the intellectual class absolutely destroy Marx.

[Anonymous No.14546043]

>>14545574
>woman detected

[Anonymous No.14546055]

>>14545161
>You won't hear "labor theory of value" one time in an econ101 class.
Because it's nonsense

[Anonymous No.14546068]

>>14546040
>add more Sowell, his thoughts on the intellectual class absolutely destroy Marx.

[Anonymous No.14546091]

>>14544937
Add John Lock

[Anonymous No.14546694]

>>14545574
they're looking for excuses not to read

[Anonymous No.14546888]

>>14546068
kek'd

[Anonymous No.14547074]

>>14544937
You should read philosophy, Marx in particular was very inspired by Hegel

[Anonymous No.14547104]

>>14546068
These two guys will be rich and successful.

[Anonymous No.14548036]

How about Weber and Simmel?

[Anonymous No.14548114]

>>14544937
Add
>Plato
>Aristotle
>multiple classics of political philosophy prior to Smith
>Fascism: 100 questions asked and answered
>For My Legionaries and Prison Notes(optional until later)
>Mein Kampf
>Gottfried Feder:
>>The Programme of the NSDAP: The National Socialist German Workers' Party and Its General Conceptions
>>The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation
>>Manifesto for Breaking the Financial Slavery to Interest
>Origins and Doctrine of Fascism

These are essential to understanding political philosophy, economics and history in general.

[Anonymous No.14548903]

>>14544937
good luck anon!

[Anonymous No.14549653]

>>14544998
>It's just that nobody explains the actual world better than Marx
How the unironic fuck do people actually believe this?
Marxism is a complete fantasy.

[Anonymous No.14549661]

>>14545479
unironically this

[Anonymous No.14549762]

OP I wish you luck.

I hope you are able to create a point by point refutation of das kapital, it's obviously possible, you just have to unravel all of the fallacies and garbage.

Please read Mises and Rothbard.
The Austrian theory of the business cycle explains so much about the economy.

Marxists think "crises" are natural in capitalism, but they don't understand that government intervention and central banking creating malinvestment is the real reason we have recessions.

If we had free markets, the economy would be stable and living standards for the working class would rise instead of stagnate like they have been doing for the past 50 years.

[Anonymous No.14549771]

OP also read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Currents_of_Marxism

And realize that Bohm Bawerk's critique of marx is correct and Hilferding was a fucking moron.

[Anonymous No.14549865]

>>14549653
Marx critique of capitalism is pretty spot on imo: reification of social relations, alienation, loss of purpose, etc. all seem to explain a lot about my immediate existence.

[Anonymous No.14549911]

Don't forget to read all three volumes

[Anonymous No.14550587]

>>14548903
>>14549762
Thanks guys, what I'm really trying to do is get a full accounting of how unthinking knee-jerk woke anticapitalism became so commonplace and how much Marx was or wasn't a part of it; it also just interests me

>>14549771
It's in the list in my OP. I just checked and managed to find it in a library a few towns over. It's the more recent Norton edition.

The passage in your pic is EXACTLY what I'm fucking talking about actually, Bohm-Bawerk's points are concise and easy to follow and Hilferding's response is impenetrable wall-of-text, it's the same feeling when I read Marx, like he's not laying all his cards on the table, like I'm being fucked with. That's why I want to study this harder. Is the pic from Main Currents?

[Anonymous No.14550682]

>>14549653
It's absolutely true though. What this anon >>14549865 says is one thing, but what's more important is that it also gives a proper understanding of historical processes and events, and of all kinds of ideological beliefs.

>>14549762
>Marxists think "crises" are natural in capitalism, but they don't understand that government intervention and central banking creating malinvestment is the real reason we have recessions.
Naive people think "capitalism" can exist in the absence of the state.

[Anonymous No.14550691]

>>14545161
>You won't hear "labor theory of value" one time in an econ101 class.
Rightly so

[Anonymous No.14550702]

>it's another basic economics thread with the same handful of books mentioned again and again

[Anonymous No.14550710]

>>14550702
Which are the repeated mentions? Say it so I never recommend them again

[Anonymous No.14550716]

>>14544958
This

[Anonymous No.14550730]

>>14550710
I'm just being an elitist desu. dscuss whichever books you like, don't let me get in your way. I can only apologise.

[Anonymous No.14550759]

>>14550587
>>14549771
This is just a bunch of semantic nitpicking and assertions.
>a careful reading of this controversy leads to the conclusion that Hilferding did not really answer
I don't understand this, in the immediate paragraph before he explained that the objections don't address Marx at all.
Value is defined in aggregate and this author keeps insisting that it must refer to individual objects. When you integrate a function, individual values of x do not matter, because what you are concerned with is the summation of all values for x through the function in aggregate.

>mfw Econ majors cant into calculus.

[Anonymous No.14550785]

>ctrl+f: Keynes 0/0
>ctrl+f: Irving Fisher 0/0
>ctrl+f: Neoclassical synthesis 0/0

[Anonymous No.14550809]

>>14544998
>Ricardo is very hard
the absolute intellectual state of Marxists. also you don't have to familiarize yourself with modern macro to read Marx, that's like saying that you need to take a class in Aristotelian physics and Ptolemeian astronomy as a prerequisite for classical mechanics

[Anonymous No.14550896]

>>14550759
he's not nitpicking, one of the points he's trying to make is that in general you can't transform labor hours into prices within the framework of Marx's LTV.

let A and B be commodities and let L(X) be the (social) labor required to produce X It's not true in general that if L(A) = L(B) then A and B have the same equilibrium price, and furthermore L(X) isn't even calculable in all but the simplest cases, and since we have to attach the caveats about socially necessary labor, why even introduce the concept anyway if "meeting a need" is prior to value anyway?

[Anonymous No.14550902]

>>14544958
>reading m*rx in an Econ glass
no wonder you europoors are so hopeless

[Anonymous No.14550922]

>>14544958
>every macro class has you read him
What macro classes have you been taking? What country do you live in?

[Anonymous No.14550930]

>>14550785
sophomore level math too hard

[Anonymous No.14551045]

>>14550896
>one of the points he's trying to make is that in general you can't transform labor hours into prices within the framework of Marx's LTV.
Which is not what Marx claims or argues or even within the scope of what he addresses. I really don't understand how that screenshot can acknowledge this and then insist that its somehow necessary and therefor Marx's thinking must be faulty.

Its like I'm discussing intersections and how to alleviate congestion in traffic and you keep telling me "but you didn't explain how to build a car" .

[Anonymous No.14551069]

>>14551045
What is Marx addressing then?

[Anonymous No.14551073]

>>14551069
The point here being that if you "address" something with a fundamentally wrong theory, the conclusions you come to are likely to be wrong.

[Anonymous No.14551090]

>>14551045
Supply and demand are contingent on labor. You don't have to assume labor as absolute, you can assume physical material, which still requires labor to bring to market. Individual prices don't matter because in aggregate they follow the law of value. There is only so much iron for steel to make cars in the world. If your friend sells you a car for $1, this does not suddenly change the amount of metal that exists.
In order for the metal to get to the car to be in your possession in the first place it requires economies of scale and the education production and reproduction of a whole workforce. The relative material costs in actual goods and products to sustain such an economy is entirely calculable and does exactly follow the law of value.
All cars across the economy take a required amount of material resources from humanity in aggregate. This is readily obvious when buying in wholesale or bulk, the base price is directly proportional to the material costs + labor + transport. You won't get steel as cheap as wood because it costs more to make.

[Anonymous No.14551110]

>>14551090
You can do the same calculations from a physical science perspective with joules from the sun stored in the earth as Carbon-Hydrogen bonds, relative to fuel sources and efficiencies, like food-human, petrol etc. Thats literally all he is saying and fucking autists keep going "nuh uh price is subjective because I bought a dildo for $0.99"

[Anonymous No.14551217]

>>14551090
The point made in >>14550896 is that in general commodities don't need to follow the law of value. The law of value states that prices are proportional to the socially necessary labor time required to produce them up to fluctuations due to supply and demand. However, if two commodities have the same price, it's not generally true that the same labor input is needed to produce them, nor is the reverse generally true. So there's no single constant of proportionality that allows one to convert from labor hours to prices, assuming we even know the labor input required to produce a given commodity. You need as many constants of proportionality/transformation functions as you have commodities, as there's no reduction of various types of labor to a single unit of abstract homogeneous labor time in a consistent manner. This makes the whole thing a bit useless.

[Anonymous No.14551625]

>>14551217
>The law of value states that prices
The law of value isn't about prices.

[Anonymous No.14551858]

A picture is worth a thousand words

[Anonymous No.14551859]

>>14551069
(2) Long-run equilibrium. We have seen that in neoclassical
analysis there is a sharp distinction between the "short run," in
which supply may change to meet demand only within the limits of
present capacity, and the "long run," in which the level of capacity
itself may rise or fall so that supply may adjust to any demand. In
the short run price is determined both by utility as reflected in
demand and by costs as reflected in supply conditions. In the long
run price is determined only by the "cost" of supply, since demand
affects only the amount of output sold. If all "costs" may be resolved
into labor cost, then the long-run case fits the Marxist argument that
the value of any commodity is determined solely by the
labor embodied in it.
Marx does not explicitly limit his value theory to the long-run
time period, but it is taken for granted and implied in all that he
says. He states very often that in his basic analysis he is only concerned with the
situation where supply equals demand, and the
context makes clear that this is long-run demand and supply. Marx
is not interested in the details of competitive jockeying for position,
but begins his analysis at the point where competition has equalized
long-run supply and demand in each industry. Later on, as we shall
see, Marx recognizes another qualification which transforms the
value concept to the more realistic "price of production" concept
(similar to Marshallian "cost"). Here he explicitly states, "The price
of production includes the average profit ... it is in the long run a
prerequisite of supply, of the reproduction of commodities in every
individual sphere."34 In other words, if the long-run price is below
this level, suppliers will not make the average profit and will move
out of the industry (but if it is above that level, then profit is above
average and more suppliers are attracted into the industry).

[Anonymous No.14551869]

>>14551859

In the short-run, the price according to the neoclassical analysis
clearly rests on both demand and supply. Demand is determined
by both income and marginal utility. A large enough increase in
demand must move production to a point of higher costs per unit
because it eventually approaches the capacity limit (by definition).
Of all this, Marx has nothing to say, unless one wishes to read some
of it into his discussion of demand as an index of "social necessity."
Even his meager discussions of this point should rather be interpreted,
however, as relating to long-run or aggregate problems.
Marxists would do best to admit that Marx has no theory of
short-run prices and outputs at the firm level because he was not
interested in these issues. Of course, this would also mean that Marx
furnishes no guide to how the socialist manager should or would
act within the limits of his production capacity, but it likewise
means that Marx presents no doctrinal barrier to the consideration
of any efficient scheme. Marx's discussion of short-run demand is
all related to the aggregate problems in which he was interested.

fuck jannies sci-hub. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40401493

[Anonymous No.14551908]

>>14551110

11.2 Thermodynamic Interpretation of Value
One can note that all the artificial things around us have special forms and are adjusted
for use in special aims. This means that there is some complexity in the environment,
a complexity that is created by man and for man. A human being is encircled by
artificial products that can be sorted and counted, so one considers the amounts of
quantities in natural units of measurement, to be given
Q1, Q2,..., Qn.
All these objects: buildings, machines, vehicles, sanitation, clothes, home appliances
and so on make up the national wealth, which can be characterised from different
points of view. However, a general characteristic of artificial objects appears to be
value. As a specific concept of economy, value should not be reduced to any other
known concepts, but, so as processes of production can be considered as processes
of transformation of ‘wild’ forms of substances into forms useful to people (mainly,
without variation of internal energy), it is possible to look for analogies in thermodynamics.

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