Marx Alternatives

[Anonymous No.20747052]

How does one even go about reading Das Kapital?
The entire thing with all 3 volumes is almost 3000 pages and there is no way i am going to read all of that, especially considering his work is incredibly dull.
Are there any overviews, condensed versions, summaries, etc in a more accessible form that still encompasses his full ideas?
Something I can get a (somewhat) complete understanding of his ideas without having to read thousands of pages of dense theory

[Anonymous No.20747067]

[Anonymous No.20747169]

>>20747052
Holy shit three thousand I didn't know it was that much. This changes my perspective: no sane person would expect the retarded proletariat to read that much about economics, therefore just as Orwell corroborates, Marxism was, is and always will be a pastime of the privileged elite. Sad!

[Anonymous No.20747179]

>>20747067
Weeeak
No Marxist

[Anonymous No.20747204]

>>20747052
Get a lobotomy. Now you can continue your consumer life without worry.

[Anonymous No.20747507]

Can someone explain part 3 to me? It's 1000 fucking pages when the other 2 volumes are around 500. Why the sudden increase? Is it because it's unedited?

[Anonymous No.20747786]

It's a pretty dry read compared to his philosophical or historical work, it's largely a work of old school economics. There's an excellent and succinct reader's guide covering each chapter of Capital in Mark Blaug's Economic Theory in Retrospect. Blaug is largely critical of Marx but isn't afraid to admit his many innovations. Worth checking out.

[Anonymous No.20747927]

>>20747052
Engels wrote Socialism: Utopian and Scientific as a primer to Marxian economics and philosophy

[Anonymous No.20748729]

>>20747052
>How does one even go about reading Das Kapital?
With your eyes, anon.

[Anonymous No.20749851]

>>20747786
>>20747927
Thanks. Will check them out

[Anonymous No.20750614]

>>20747067
Based. Marxism is a mental disorder.

[Anonymous No.20750640]

>>20747169
Communist manifesto is just about 70 pages tho

[Anonymous No.20750662]

>gibs me dat
There thats the books

[Anonymous No.20751558]

Not a single serious answer thus far.

Read David Harvey, beginning with the limits to capital. Harvey has been writing about Marx's works more or less for the past thirty years.

[Anonymous No.20752574]

>>20747169
Nobody tell him what vanguard party means.

[Anonymous No.20752584]

>>20747052
Read this to start. But you should really read the source material.

[Anonymous No.20752715]

>>20751558
it's a shit question
just read capital

[Anonymous No.20752721]

>>20747052
Skip Marx; read Hobbes and Smith instead.

[Anonymous No.20752723]

>>20750640
the communist manifesto is bollocks that should be discarded. what's important about marx is his ideas about overcoming the limits of capitalism. not to replace with communism or socialism, but some new post-capitalist system

[Anonymous No.20752819]

>>20752584
>>20752715
There’s no way I’m dedicating my time to reading three thousand pages of dull communist theory that I’m going to end up mostly disagreeing with. Hence why I’m looking for a more concise version

>>20752721
Was planning to read Hobbes and Smith first, and then move on to Marx last

[Anonymous No.20752827]

>>20747927
Engels was also responsible for turning Marxism into the culture war nonsense it is today

[Anonymous No.20752944]

>>20752819
Read 1000 pages of Leszek Kołakowski's Main Currents of Marxism instead

[Anonymous No.20752955]

don't read Marx. It's a huge waste of time and both his economics and political philosophy have been superceded by much smarter people. Althusser, Fromm, Roemer, etc. There are much smarter and more relevant Marxists than Marx.

[Anonymous No.20752981]

Read Wage Labour and Capital, Anti-Duhring, and Main Currents of Marxism (just the first volume, and skip ahead and read thr chapter on 19th century socialism first)

Tucker's Philosophy and Myth in Marx is also a newbie friendly starting point. He edited the Marx-Engels reader which is also good.

A tip, don't think of Marx as a Hegelian. He is not doing some "more Hegelian than Hegel" trick to create a "dialectical" meta-philosophy. He has an unjustified and simply presupposed materialist anthropology in which man is just a social animal that makes conceptual systems to aid his material life. Marx and Engels begin by rejecting Hegel, not "inverting" him or any such confusing phrasing. Marx's complaint about all Hegelians is that they set up concepts like "the State" and then try to deduce historical movements from the concepts, instead of just seeing the concepts a society has (like "state") as cultural forms emanating from real social relations. 90% of the confusion surrounding Marx comes from idiotic Marxists who don't read him and really want to be Hegelians (they don't read Hegel either).

In a real sense Marx is Hegelian, mainly in his epistemology, which is sort of coherentist/pragmatist as we'd say today (this is why Sidney Hook the pragmatist philosopher and Marxist has a very good reading of Marx). But he totally rejects "dialectical history" as most people vulgarly conceive it and associate it with Hegel.

Marxism really stands or falls on premises he outlines in Wage Labour and Capital. The basic premise is simply that the aforementioned really existing productive relations, and the social forms that flow from them (labour, wages, capital, money, private property) naturally produce crises and the proletariat is crushed by these crises and thus will eventually overthrow the bourgeoisie-proletariat relation of production and all its attendant conceptual forms. Communism is simply whatever comes after that, spontaneously.

[Anonymous No.20752989]

This thread is made by a same-fagging, green-text tranny.

[Anonymous No.20752992]

>>20752989
I hear him approaching too. The anti-Kolalowski schizo is here already.

[Anonymous No.20752995]

>>20747052
You should start with the Protocols of Zion and Communism with the Mask off by Goebbels.

[Anonymous No.20753000]

>>20752723
This. Kind of ironic how "progressives" are obsessed about going back to traditional socialism rather than improving and going beyond what we already have.

[Anonymous No.20753010]

>>20747052
Gibs me dat, because all human history demands it.
Now, I've summarized it for you.

[Anonymous No.20753021]

>>20752819
I know this isn't a book recommendation, but why not read the Plato Stanford page on Marx?

[Anonymous No.20753055]

>>20753021
I probably will do that. I just prefer reading an actual physical book especially when it comes to philosophy and such

[Anonymous No.20753470]

>>20752819
NGMI. Do you want to understand capitalism or not? This is the only way.

[Anonymous No.20753521]

thomas sowell's book on marxism the first half is an ok secondary source on marx, the second half is a biography where he really hammers on what a shitty person marx was. if you want something written by a marxist, i think ernest mandell did a summary of capital that was good. also very short introductions will give you a solid overview in the smallest amount of pages probably.

[Anonymous No.20753535]

op u know only volume 1 was published in his lifetime and the reason he didn't publish the other two volumes is because they have problems and contradictions that he couldn't work out. even marxists will admit this and they buy anything.

[Anonymous No.20753538]

>>20747052
>Something I can get a (somewhat) complete understanding of his ideas without having to read thousands of pages of dense theory

[Anonymous No.20753542]

>>20747052

[Anonymous No.20753582]

>>20747052
all you need is to read chapter 2 of the communist manifesto. read that single chapter, you real quickly realize how utterly retarded communism is. and where culture marxism comes from.
>You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
>Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
>The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
>Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
>But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
>The bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.
>When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.
>“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.”

telling your kid to take out the trash, is oppression to marx. having a wife, is oppression according to marx. having families is oppression to marx. having knowledge, is oppression to marx because you horde it. middle class is terrible, and oppression, to marx.

to marx:
>Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
this single sentence sums up communism.

[Anonymous No.20753592]

>>20753582
>Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
no need to abolish the poor, because it was already abolished! and that's a good thing!
>In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
oh, so because some people own a lot of capital, we must abolish ALL capital to make it that no one owns any capital. i got it marx.

[Anonymous No.20753596]

>>20753470
>understanding capitalism
>>by a man that never worked a day in his life, drained his wife of her entire fortune
>begged his buddy to keep funding him
>and died alone, broke.
he couldn't make it as a capitalist. its why he hated it.

[Anonymous No.20753603]

>>20753582
>>20753592
>We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.
>The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
>Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
>Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
>1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
>2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
>3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
>4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
>5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
>6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
>7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
>8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
>9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
>10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
>When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

[Anonymous No.20753621]

>>20753603
so lets break this down. to defeat monopoly of a few, is to make a giant monopoly. but its ok, this time will work, because GOOD communist would never, ever abuse all that power. people who horde things never want to give it up, but a good communist will somehow magically give it all up and abolish the state after centralizing everything to themselves. yes this logic clearly checks out. what can go wrong with state owned schools? not like we will get re-education camps or gulags or anything. not like a lenin, stalin, castro, NK, can happen right? oh no, that's all FBI propaganda.

because a few people horde many things, make it that no one can horde anything. so the poor wanting things, are actually the bad guys here. its good for them to be poor, because their property was abolished already. and because of that, they have no capital and thus, no social power. so its not about helping the poor. its about stripping of everyone of their property to prevent anyone from having any social power.

going through a period of owning nothing, will magically make people give up the desire to owning things. everyone will some how magically work together, get along, and sing love songs. no money, no trade, no nothing. people will just work on their own time and own desire! you see! stupid capitalist! if you want to work, you just wake up one morning and go to the shop and work to make the book you want if no one picks up your add in the paper to make one for you, for free, on their own desire!

[Anonymous No.20753634]

>>20753621
>>When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
and some how, giving the state all the power of capital will some how make the political power become nothing... but some how having someone with everything that gives them all the capital is bad. but that's because the capitalist isn't a communist? so it just takes good communist! that's right. a good communist is all you need for communist utopia.

his entire logic makes absolutely no sense. by abolishing everything, some how people just forget and all the bad urges some how disappear. suddenly you can trust a few people (the state) to own all the things. but its ok, its the people's state! all 300 million will some how run the entire government. you just need radicalize people who really hate capitalism and LOVE communism to work. and because the state has all the power, their is some how no incentive of them to be bad? and can just abolish the state and the people will some how just work together, play nice, and now i'm just repeating myself.

its stupid.

[Anonymous No.20753652]

>>20753634
>his entire logic makes absolutely no sense. by abolishing everything, some how people just forget and all the bad urges some how disappear
That's why if you see tradfags, laugh at them.

[Anonymous No.20753654]

>>20753582
and there's more to these, but they all just rant about what he wrote here. what marx did was apply his economic theory to culture all because of his conclusion that CAPITAL = SOCIAL POWER. he followed his own logic. he broke down the problem of ownership of resources. its that capital gives you social power. its that social power that allows you to "oppress" people. to marx, capital isn't just physical goods, its anything you can horde to use over someone. let it be knowledge, let it be love. this is why he concluded families need to be abolished, marriage needs to be abolished, religion needs to be abolished, traditions, etc.

its also how you get the communist "abolish the past" because of also what marx wrote. lets continue what he said:
>“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”
>What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.
>But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.
>The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
since the "past" had ideas that allowed people to own things, the past needs to be abolished. abolish religion, abolish science, abolish philosophy, abolish traditions, etc. this is the reason why all communist societies heavily erased history and tried their hardest to destroy traditions and such.

don't learn from the past. don't learn from mistakes. don't believe anything anyone said in the past before communism. abolish it all, like you are abolishing property. rewrite everything through the lens of communism instead.
>no wives
>no families
>no parents
>you use love to coerce your wife to make you a sandwich
>you use your children to pass down knowledge to, teach them a trade, have them milk a cow, etc to extract capital from them
>you use families to help take care of each other, therefor, you are extracting capital from them to benefit yourself
you can see how terribly destructive this line of thinking is. its why i find it funny when i see pic related because communism isn't about everyone working together to help each other. as YOU helping someone is letting that person extract capital from you.

[Anonymous No.20753674]

>>20753654
>>you use love to coerce your wife to make you a sandwich
"So far as a woman is concerned, for example, a more modest man considers having at his disposal her body and sexual gratification as a satisfactory and sufficient sign of having, of possession. Another man, with his more suspicious and more discriminating thirst for possessions sees the “question mark,” the fact that such a possession is only apparent, and wants a more refined test, above all, to know whether the woman not only gives herself to him but also for his sake gives up what she has or would like to have. Only then does he consider her “possessed.” A third man, however, is at this point not yet finished with his suspicion and desire to possess. He asks himself if the woman, when she gives up everything for him, is not doing this for something like a phantom of himself: he wants to be well known first, fundamentally, even profoundly, in order to be able, in general, to be loved. He dares to allow himself to be revealed.—Only then does he feel that the loved one is fully in his possession, when she is no longer deceived about him, when she loves him just as much for his devilry and hidden insatiability as for his kindness, patience, and spirituality."
(Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 194)

>you can see how terribly destructive this line of thinking is
"Something could well be true, although it is at the same time harmful and dangerous to the highest degree. In fact, it could even be part of the fundamental composition of existence that people are destroyed when they fully recognize this point—so that the strength of a spirit might be measured by how much it could still endure of the “truth,” or put more clearly, by the degree it would have to have the truth diluted, sweetened, muffled, or falsified. But there is no doubt about the fact that evil and unhappy people are more favoured and have a greater probability of success in discovering certain parts of the truth, to say nothing of the evil people who are happy—a species which moralists are silent about."
(Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 39)

[Anonymous No.20753680]

I'm reading it right now. Got like 30 pages in - not bad!

[Anonymous No.20753684]

>>20753654
what communism is about is becoming a hive mind. completely abolishing individuality.

no one owns a single damn thing. not even the knowledge they have in their head because that knowledge can be used for that person to gain capital which will allow them to use that as power over someone else to get them to do something for them that only benefits that person with the knowledge.

this is why you are post to abolish families. abolish wives. its sickening. marx doesn't take love into consideration at all. its a perverted world view. having your kid to take out the trash is literately oppression to him because "you used your child to extract capital out of that child to benefit you." you can't teach your children anything. you can't have your child help you. how the fuck can you expect to build a society where people are post to help people if you can't?

no one does anything for anyone because that person wants YOU do to something for them. so that leaves either a society that some how just gets along and people are willing to work for free, willing to work to not own anything, not on someone else's desire, but their own desire because they want to help? you need everyone on the same page that you are to only do something on your own desire so that no one can manipulate you... or some hive mind society. we're you strip people of individual thought. both make no sense.

its all just fucking retarded. i struggle because it doesn't matter how much i keep reading the manifesto and trying to understand his logic. it makes no fucking sense. i treat marxism as a whole as a religion.

its to make you hate current society, burn it all down, no more love, no more families, no more anything, and from the ashes, people are just post to get along and some how be completely selfless while simultaneously not forced to do anything they don't want to do. which again, how the fuck can you be both selfless, and not forced to do something you want to do. you can argue not helping someone, is being selfish. its not compatible.

but then, marx thinking that all it takes is GOOD communist is all you need to have a giant state monopoly that will never abuse its power and some how magically will lose its political power and abolish itself. ignoring how will you enforce not owning things. it goes back to his magical belief that if people go through a period of not being allowed to own things, they will lose all desire to own things forever.

none of it makes sense.

[Anonymous No.20753688]

Is communism basically impossible now given that most people don't read and capitalism has produced a media matrix that is probably physically or psychologically impossible to see beyond for too many, thereby any intelligent and concerted organization apart from the present market economy is infeasible? It's too hard. Sit back, watch porn or netflix, or game!!!

[Anonymous No.20753691]

>>20753684
>not even the knowledge they have in their head
https://firstness.org/issues/1/the-birth-of-faustianism
"In “pure” oral societies this dynamism of the spoken word coincides with a dynamic world view where everything is perceived to be in flux. Speech is local, direct and inclusive. It is also the closest to interior thought. In societies using the oral medium exclusively as means of communication, we find that this medium influences social structures and thought patterns. Past and future are assimilated into the present. Time is not a continuum, but an ever-present reality. Oral communication also allows for the closest possible association of the knower and the known. Knowledge is not understood as a personal commodity, but rather as a communal event. Ritual, totem, and taboo, which regulate pure oral societies, serve as collective mnemonic aids. Myths and epics, sung or chanted, serve as collections of the wisdom, morals and customs of society. Those with good memories, especially the elders of the tribe, achieve a position of power. Those who speak loudest become the most efficient leaders. The “pure” oral world is a world of spirits. It is a world in which the elusiveness and interiority of the spoken word coincides with a dynamic concept of time, a world where a communal awareness rather than an individual awareness focuses human consciousness, and where authoritarian traditionalism is vested in the elders of the tribe. These social parameters also encourage the development of peculiar characteristics necessary to cope in such an environment, for example, the development of the capacity to remember vast amounts of information and to obey older people."

"The mysticism which is inherent in oral culture we can see in the the language of “through him and with him and in him”. Solidarity with Christ is not dependent on his being present on the earth, he is a super-personal spirit which speaks directly through the preacher in the unity of the “oral synthesis” as Kelber called it. If we are in a state of sin here Adam is acting within us, we are not just trying to interpret what Christ is saying but instead are engaged in a mimesis where we consume Christ and he acts through us and is present. It is not only the case however that in Paul there is this oral collectivism, but as we have seen, people in the supposed past like Adam and Christ are also present. This won’t make much sense until we understand the temporality which Paul is operating in and the manner by which he was supposed to be interpreted which we will turn to immediately."

>no one owns a single damn thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years#The_concept_of_%22everyday_communism%22

[Anonymous No.20753696]

>>20753688
most communist don't read their own ideology. its why you have some many who think:
>communism is healthcare
>communism is where people just work together
>communism is where poor will have things

[Anonymous No.20753701]

>>20753691
well, we have to tape everyone's mouth shut then.

[Anonymous No.20753704]

>>20753696
Yeah, this ends communism. Like the marxists who want people to stop teaching the greeks in university because they're "White," like Jesus fuck.

[Anonymous No.20753709]

>>20753704
can you be surprised? marx concluded capital = social power. whites have the social power because they have the capital. abolish whites.

you see the fucking retarded logic that follows with this line of thinking?

[Anonymous No.20753721]

>>20747052
Read Richard Wolff's Understanding Marxism if you want the short version.

>>20751558
This guy is also correct, Harvey is the best guide if you have more time.

[Anonymous No.20753722]

>>20753704
>marxists who want people to stop teaching the greeks in university because
https://unherd.com/2021/11/theres-nothing-woke-about-crypto/
"But this has it backwards. “Wokeness” isn’t an upstart faith. It’s a secularised, mutant form of the Protestantism that began with Luther. It’s the creed of our current elite establishment, with near-hegemonic power, and it’s subject to many of the same critiques as the then-hegemonic Catholic Church was in Luther’s time, down to the selling of indulgences. In this story, “wokeness” isn’t the schism; it’s the established church."


https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/are-we-in-a-500-year-religious-revolution
"In the last decade we’ve seen the emergence in the West of a strident new ideology of “Social Justice” which, despite its self-conceived secularism, many observers have now convincingly argued bears all the hallmarks of a new religious cult, complete with a new metaphysics of truth and reality, a concept of original sin, a new hierarchy of moral virtues, a self-constructed canonical liturgy and a strict orthodoxy, a de-facto priesthood, sacred spaces, self-abasing rituals, a community of believers, linguistic shibboleths, blasphemy laws, and excommunication – among other giveaways.

But, quite notably, this “New Faith” seems to have, consciously or unconsciously, modeled most of its belief system and ritual practices straight out of the Christian tradition, from an overarching preoccupation with the weak and the victimized, along with an emphasis on atonement (though any conception of grace, forgiveness, or redemption is notably absent), right down to specific forms of ritual, like the washing of feet or the symbolic reenactment of martyrdom."


https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over
"What is called “Wokeness” – or the “Successor Ideology,” or the “New Faith,” or what have you (note the foe hasn’t even been successfully named yet, let alone routed) – rests on a series of what are ultimately metaphysical beliefs. The fact that their holders would laugh at the suggestion they have anything called metaphysical beliefs is irrelevant – they hold them nonetheless. Such as:
The world is divided into a dualistic struggle between oppressed and oppressors (good and evil); language fundamentally defines reality; therefore language (and more broadly “the word” – thought, logic, logos) is raw power, and is used by oppressors to control the oppressed; this has created power hierarchies enforced by the creation of false boundaries and authorities; no oppression existed in the mythic past, the utopian pre-hierarchical State of Nature, in which all were free and equal; the stain of injustice only entered the world through the original sin of (Western) civilizational hierarchy; <...>"

[Anonymous No.20753726]

>>20753691
>Closer to home, he gives this example: "If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, 'Hand me the wrench,' his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, 'And what do I get for it?' ... The reason is simple efficiency... : if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them."[4]:95–96 Moreover, we tend to ask and give without thinking for things like asking directions, or
holy shit this line of thinking completely depends on the kindness of strangers. you cannot build a society off people willing to do it out of kindness. even if you try to replace it with efficiency its not going to work. how many fucking times do you hear people say "there is no price that will get me to clean toilets or be a janitor." or the "i won't do something for anything less than X amount because i don't want to do it."

yes you can have a buddy hand you a hammer, but that buddy is handing you the hammer because he's your buddy. he isn't doing it out of "efficiency." your buddy isn't sitting there going "well, darn it! we gotta be as efficient as we can, so the only reason why i'm handing you this hammer is because it make it go faster!." but in the end, you are only asking him to hand you a hammer. you're not asking him to build you a fucking house from scratch. i'm pretty sure he's going to WANT something from you in exchange to building a fucking two story house.

yes small tribes generally worked together, but it was out of the need to survive. and they still always had rewards. my favorite is the Indian tribes out on those islands off the coast of india. completely isolated tribes that are barely in the stone age. there is a video floating around where a helicopter flew by. tribal men came out and shot arrows at it. after the helicopter moved back, they cheered because they thought they "slayed" whatever creature they thought the helicopter was.

then they got rewarded. can you guess what their reward was? tribal women came out, laid down on the sand, spread their legs wide open, and the men started to fuck the women as their reward for defending the tribe.

[Anonymous No.20753727]

>>20753709

What do they hope to gain? Are they going to stop teaching mathematics because so much of it was charted by Europeans? What do they want? I'm underread on Marx/Engels so I will put it all together as I continue reading, but how to contemporary Marxists level with what is essentially an anti-intellectualism which benefits no one?

[Anonymous No.20753734]

>>20753727
*how do

Is it just pure nihilism on their part? Let's acquire social power in a mechanized economy without regarding any of the intellectual effort that capital accumulation, in many cases, demands? Are they not putting the cart before the horse here?

[Anonymous No.20753740]

>>20753726
guilt, shame, etc. re-education camps like you wrote would do it to program people into doing things a certain way. will it work in the long run? probably not. like you said earlier, gulags were made for a reason. lenin said it himself, those who do not work, do not eat. one thing i find fascinating is that nearly all communist societies always turn into some form of feudalism in the end. the peasants are forced to work, for free, to benefit a ruling class. in communist societies, the party officials. the peasants get whatever scraps are leftover. you really do rebuild a society based off slave labor.

[Anonymous No.20753761]

>>20753727
>>20753734
if you keep reading marx and any marxist work, you will realize something very fast. its an ideology based off hate.
communist manifesto, famous line:
>workers of the world unite, all you have to lose is your chains
its a call to revolution
it gets you to hate the current system
it gets you radicalized
it teaches you to destroy the current system
it makes you the victim of an unjust system
it tells you to rebuild a new system
but, its vague on what system you are to make because marx himself didn't know. there is a reason why his work, and most of his work, i would say 95% of it is centered around why the current system is bad. and the last 5% is some general idea of a system to replace the current system.

so it leaves people running around like chickens without their head. they apply what they were taught. to repeat again, communism = capital is the problem because capital = social power. so its all about power. that's what communism is.

so destroy anything that has power over you. you gain the power, but because you are a communist, you are a good person and therefor, just. YOU won't abuse the power because you are the victim. defeat your oppressors, you only have your chains to lose after all.

hell marx even argued that a communist can use any means necessary to achieve revolution. marx writes that you can be hypercritical of your own ideology if it means it will help you achieve revolution. you don't need to live by your own standards.

so with all of that, can you be shocked communism has been repeatedly used to do bad things, and used by bad people for their own selfish desire? think about it, put your shoes in as a bad person. someone who is a good manipulative asshole who wants to benefit yourself.
>its a call to revolution / radicalizes people
so the ideology gets people mad. you don't have to get them mad, the communist manifesto will do that for you
>it gets people to want to burn down the current system
that's great, if you want to take over and put in your own system
>it gets people to abolish their own property
that's great, if you want to redistribute their property to yourself. you don't have to take their property by force, they give it up, for free.

can you be surprised you get people like Kim Jong-il and Castro and the near monarchy he set up in cuba?

so if you are a hateful person, its an attractive ideology. and they can use it to benefit themselves. the irony of communism is that its a very selfish ideology.

[Anonymous No.20753768]

>>20752574
The vanguard guards the van. Alternatively it is a contraction of Varangian Guard.

[Anonymous No.20753769]

>>20753761
>hypercritical
hypocritical*

[Anonymous No.20753777]

>>20753761
Why aren't more people in the states stirring up the middle class/rural folk against these people? If the communists want blood, I know plenty of people in the country who would happily return the sentiment. America's already pretty heavily propagandized against their favor, and Trump is quasi-fascistic and will probably be taking the country back in a couple of years.

[Anonymous No.20753796]

>>20753726
2020 lock downs showed most people, if given whatever they need to live, won't do anything. but, it will make people bored and want to burn down cities. all the countries that have tried UBI, like finland, stopped them, because it overall didn't improve people actually working. it made people happy and less stressful, but they still didn't want to work. some people may hand you the hammer, others won't. even if someone has an ability for something, and you give them everything they need to do it, doesn't mean they will in the end. my wife loves painting and i always have cheered her on for it. supported her fully, bought her everything she needed. she in the end, doesn't paint much. never made anything out of it.
>>20753740
i think that's what the whole social activism is about. i think they are trying to get people radicalize as a way to motivate people to do things they normally wouldn't do. all its lead to though has been causing more suffering, fighting, and arguments. but then again, the guilt has worked. but now you are getting people to do something they don't want to do. yeah, does lead to feudalism. its the soviet union again. massive amount of propaganda (you are building something bigger than yourself!) to make people feel like they are not living in a feudalistic society.

i know marxist would argue is it not the same under capitalism? i wouldn't really argue against it outside the fact, its worked far better than any communist nation on the face of the planet. for the sole reason, you get compensation. the problem with capitalism has been, the level of compensation and the inequality of it. middle class boomers had it well. i have it well. inherited my parents house, no mortgage is nice. cars are paid off, money in the bank.

i think the problem for most people is the inequality. communism meme that "everyone is equal, equally poor" is to damn true. capitalism is, if in the west, most are middle class and higher. but you have this large hierarchy system. where you get retards like the people who work on SNL that make six figures whining about being poor in comparison to elon musk. rich people mad someone else is more rich than them. while the guy watching SNL lives in a tin trailer in quartzside AZ making 20k a year.


but then you have the third world. ultimately, i think its the inconvenient truth there isn't enough resources to have everyone be middle class or higher. and i don't think there ever will be because the goal post will always move to the new era. poor today lives like nobles in the 1600's.

problem communist have, is that they read marxist work, get told capitalism is the worst thing ever, but then run into the inconvenient truth their solution is worse than capitalism that they were told was the worst thing.

[Anonymous No.20753812]

>>20753796
i hear it all the time "so much wealth in america, but they have poor!" because the inconvenient truth is, not enough resources to SUSTAIN everyone at a middle class or higher. even social democratic nations like canada or finland abolished poorness. if you take all the billionaires in america, you don't even get 1 trillion dollars. you only round out to around 900 billion. problem is, they don't make 900 billion a year. it was 900 billion over a lifetime. most of it in stock. they sell the stock to get it, that's it. that's literately it. i saw on reddit people talking about how jeff bezos makes like 20 million a month! well he doesn't. but they based it off his stock price. if he sells his stock, that's it. its a one time transaction. its not a salary. amazon doesn't make enough money to pay jeff 200 billion dollars.

so you seize 100% of the wealth all the billionaires in america has, make them homeless living under a bridge, seize their yachts and sell them for the money. all you get is around 900 billion. a single 900 billion dollar payment. that wouldn't even pay one year of what the US government spends.

Rothschild's in the UK are worth 400 billion. but 400 billion that's taken from the 1800's till now to obtain. two centuries to accumulate 400 billion. you seize it all, you won't get it again.

there is not enough resources to sustain even a single country at a middle class or higher. all you can do is have enough. but the problem is, you will always have inequality.

so it comes down to, do you have areas of the planet that have a large middle class population, with other areas poor. or do you have everyone poor, but equal.
>>20753777
left wing people own the spheres of influence. from mass media, to academia. middle class / rural people, unless they learn on their own, don't know any better. iirc 97% of faculty on college campuses in the US identify as left wing. its not in their interest to go against their own political tribe's ideology.

[Anonymous No.20753813]

>>20753812
>even social democratic nations like canada or finland abolished poorness.
even social democratic nations like canada or finland didn't abolished poorness*

i'm knocked out from oxy.

[Anonymous No.20753824]

>>20753812
It's a fucking massive opportunity to educate the rural folk or genuinely anyone who would be against this if they found out about it. I've been around these university leftists, they will crack immediately should it ever get even close to "real." They are scared of the "crazy" people in the fly-over.

[Anonymous No.20753825]

>>20753812
and don't quote me exactly on the total value of billionaires in the US. but i do know for a fact, all their wealth combined doesn't equal to what the US government spends a year. a single seize wouldn't even fund the US government for a single year. and it be all gone after that.

[Anonymous No.20753832]

>>20753812
>>20753824
I genuinely think in the Trump movement, there is an opportunity for a new McCarthyism, and given how extended Marxists are, it's warranted.

[Anonymous No.20753845]

>>20753582
>The bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production.
no i see my girlfriend as my lover and spouse you fucking prick. jesus, asking my wife to help me is not using me oppressing her. holy fuck now i understand feminist roots to marxism. completely bastardizing what it means to have realtionships. if you go into a relationship thinking "this person only wants to use me for my labor" you are doing it for all the wrong reasons. jesus christ. wasn't marx married? maybe it was his own projection of how he viewed his wife. which then comes to, just because you are the asshole, doesn't mean EVERYONE is the asshole. i love my girlfriend from the bottom of my heart and i would die for her. fuck you.
>hurr simp
fuck off. learn what love is.

[Anonymous No.20753917]

>>20753726
You can't depend on having enough people do everything that needs to be done, for free. Even if you try to put people into places that they are naturally good at, doesn't mean they will want to do it. Especially without a reward. The soviet union even brought back currency and gave "bonuses" to those who did good while working in the factories. Some people yes, i'm sure. I had one guy in my WoW guild that logged on everyday just to fill the guild bank with ore. All he did was mine ore and gave it to the guild for free. But that was one guy out of like thousands of players I knew and ran into in WoW. You can't build a society depending on getting enough people like that. And even then. I'm sure people like him were selective. Not everyone is willing to do something like that for everyone. Sad thing too about the guy was he never got any gear. We never brought him into raids. We quite literately just used him for free ore lol. Not going to stop someone who is willing to work for free and benefit you. But then that should also tell you how you will never, ever have an "equal" or "equitable" society.

[Anonymous No.20753937]

>>20752981
>A tip, don't think of Marx as a Hegelian
Jesus Christ, shut the fuck up and read Lenin you gigantic retard

[Anonymous No.20753957]

>>20747052
it's not dull if you're interested in the content. if you aren't, then just don't read him

[Anonymous No.20753968]

>>20747052
https://www.robingoodfellow.info/pagesen/rubriques/meren.htm

[Anonymous No.20753989]

>>20753845
Marx cheated on his wife repeatedly, he was not a good person.

[Anonymous No.20754016]

>>20753777
Kind of tragic that communism doesn't succeed in riling up the proletariat to defend their own interests, but some pumpkinface mf can make it revolt to fill the pockets of the bourgeoisie some more ... Then again the US have never had an ounce of critical thinking

[Anonymous No.20754029]

>>20753989
No, he didn’t you lying piece of shit. There’s absolutely no proof he did. He took care of his maid’s son but that’s doesn’t constitute an evidence.

[Anonymous No.20754043]

>>20754029
Holy cope.

[Anonymous No.20754057]

>>20753825
(it's not "seize the wealth", it's "seize the means of production")
Anyway you're right, we can't sustain everyone at middle class consumption or higher. But there's a difference between middle class consumption (the product of decades of the bourgeoisie convincing idiots that in order to be happy they need a new bread maker, a new washing machine, a new phone, flights to different continents every summer, more, more, more) and middle class living standards, sufficient happiness.
That's easy to sustain with the current state of technology.

>>20753845
Read it again friend, try it a bit slower this time around.

[Anonymous No.20754145]

>>20753989
so he got to fuck two women, while the /lit/ average is 0? is that why you all hate him so much?

[Anonymous No.20755633]

>>20753596
Retard.

[Anonymous No.20755660]

>>20747052
heinrich's "an introduction to the three volumes of karl marx's capital" is what you're looking for, without question

[Anonymous No.20755757]

>>20753937
Lenin had a terrible misreading of Marx that was interesting in its own right. Funnily enough the best place to start with Lenin is the Lenin anthology also edited by Tucker. The chapter on Lenin in Kolakowski isn't so great, but Bernstein's assessment of the Bolsheviks was good.

Not talking to you directly since you're a phoneposting discord tourist but to anyone interested who actually reads.

[Anonymous No.20755767]

Camatte
This world we must leave

[Anonymous No.20755799]

>>20752574
It means Blanquist revisionism

[Anonymous No.20755943]

>>20753021
>Plato Stanford page on Marx
probably the worst text on Marx on the internet, even wikipedia is better

[Anonymous No.20755993]

>>20747927
Socialism:utopian and scientific is really the brainlet version of classical marxism. Either he reads Das Kapital, or he doesn't know about Marx.
>>20752827
Engels was homophobic, and generally trad, according to today's standards.
>>20752995
Capitalistic protocols of Zion. Manual of the perfect Capitalist, now accessible for the goyim.

[Anonymous No.20756076]

Djilas' The New Class

[Anonymous No.20756296]

>>20755757
name one misreading of Marx by Lenin

[Anonymous No.20756354]

>Just read thousands of pages of 19th century prose
>No it hasn't been refined, simplified, or modernized in a way anyone can agree on
>Trust me bro, this is scientific and not just obfuscated bullshit for rich dorks

[Anonymous No.20756419]

>>20756354
the Fowkes and Fernbach translations are from the 1970s. stop being such a baby

[Anonymous No.20756646]

>>20756419
he's right though

[Anonymous No.20756675]

>>20756296
(not him)Dictatorship of the proletariat is not a vanguard.

[Anonymous No.20756688]

>>20752723
Scary but realist understanding of Marx. Capitalism is dying anyway due to the TRPF. We can only hope the next mode of production won't be dystopian.

[Anonymous No.20756713]

>>20756296
spend one weekday not arguing about your sub-sect of a sub-sect of marxism on social media

[Anonymous No.20756767]

>>20756646
it's comprehensible, modern prose. I can read it no problem as an ESL. it's not a good excuse
>>20756675
Lenin never read Marx as saying this though. unless you can prove it
>>20756688
how could society of associated producers be dystopian? the current content of the concept of dystopia is taken straight from the developments of bourgeois society. it's an expression of the power of capital growing to immense proportions and suffocating human beings under its weight.
>>20756713
what's the argument? I just want to be enlightened as to the ways in which Lenin has misread Marx

[Anonymous No.20756859]

>>20756767
>how could society of associated producers be dystopian?
Artificial intelligence.

[Anonymous No.20756875]

>>20747507
yet its unfinished

[Anonymous No.20756935]

>>20752827
That's more Gramsci and some postmodern marxists, no?

[Anonymous No.20756955]

>>20756859
that and dragons coming through a portal from Westeros to terrorize people. also a possibility

[Anonymous No.20757095]

>>20747507
You will never understand the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

[Anonymous No.20757800]

What does Trotsky mean by the leadership is the subjective factor of the revolution? I'm dumb

[Anonymous No.20757817]

Also Marx is pretty based. Like how many authors actually took part in a revolution although a failed one.

[Anonymous No.20757886]

Don't bother with Marx.

[Anonymous No.20758001]

>>20757886
poopoo peepee