• Parsani [love/loves, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    Marxism is a way to view the world that has like 7 books written on it

    data-laughing

    Marx had a fundamental misunderstanding in that the cost of something doesn’t affect its end value. It may affect its price, but value isn’t the same thing as price either.

    Hence most left wing Marxist-based economies sucking.

    This is trivial to demonstrate; look at the Juicero. Tons of labor and materials poured into making one (hence a high cost) which required setting a high price to recoup… but very little value. Nobody bought the damn things, so it’s high price did not match it’s value. Other examples are industrial settings, where custom fixtures/molds can reach 6 digit $ price tags during production runs. Then at EOL for the project be sold off for literal pennies to scrap dealers.

    Lmao, Marx famously failed to consider socially useless labor time and fixed capital investment.

    • btbt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      One failed product clearly disproves everything Marx ever wrote, communism has never been more finished

    • TerminalEncounter [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Gotta love showing an example of how capitalism failed means communism didn’t work lmao. Yeah there might be people starving and juiceros being created and failing but that definitely doesn’t have to do with the distribution of goods based on profit instead of need. Nope.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Marxism is a way to view the world that has like 7 books written on it

      Aside from that Marx and Engels personally wrote more than this, it’s always insightful how they don’t just not know about communism and don’t know that there’s a lot they don’t know, but also actively suppose there is almost nothing to know even according to communists

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      This person pulls a bait and switch in the worst way. They mention the failures of socialist economies, then goes on to describe the Juicero, which as a failure of the excesses of venture capital.

      In fact if I remember right, a Chinese company copied the design of the Juicero, scrapped the useless parts like the QR reader and the wifi, and sold it for less than $100. They probably made a profit. Chalk up a win for socialism I guess.

    • TraumaDumpling@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      LMFAO these people think gold and diamonds just spawn on the surface like Monster Hunter resource gathering points and all you have to do is pick them up

      what is mining? sounds like Tankie Misinformation to me lol

    • robinn_IV [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      I wonder if there’s some sort of monopoly on diamonds artificially inflating their price. Does Marx talk about supply/demand and explain that this can alter prices but not value? I wonder.

      Anyways, this person thinking it takes no time/effort to “produce” diamonds/gold is funny (esp. with the case of lab diamonds).

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Marx does talk about precious/luxury goods in Capital volume 1 actually. If I remember right he specifically talks about pearls and paintings. But if I remember right he doesn’t define paintings as commodities, since their value can’t be reproduced through the same methods, since the value comes from the rarity associated with the artist. He says something similar about pearls too.

      But that poster is completely wrong. Gold doesn’t take labor to mine out of the ground? Diamonds don’t take labor to mine or synthesize? What

      • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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        10 months ago

        Literally in the first chapter of Capital Volume 1:

        “Jacob doubts whether gold has ever been paid for at its full value. This applies still more to diamonds. According to Eschwege, the total produce of the Brazilian diamond mines for the eighty years, ending in 1823, had not realised the price of one-and-a-half years’ average produce of the sugar and coffee plantations of the same country, although the diamonds cost much more labour, and therefore represented more value. With richer mines, the same quantity of labour would embody itself in more diamonds, and their value would fall. If we could succeed at a small expenditure of labour, in converting carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks.

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          I like that Marx mentions diamonds. Lab grown diamonds are around a third the price of mined diamonds, specifically because there are less people performing labor on them. I believe most of the cost of lab diamonds comes from the cutting of it, since diamonds still take specialized equipment to cut.

          • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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            10 months ago

            Yeah, he really mentions how diamonds would be “the price of a brick” and industrial diamonds pretty much are. But jewelry diamonds are still expensive, and the diamond industry is a great way to introduce people to Marxist concepts of value.

    • Pisha [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children’s primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

      Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

    • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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      10 months ago

      It feels like a weird joke. Like this is how I would do a parody of someone who refuses to read Capital. I’d make statements exactly like this, mentioning things that Marx explicitly mentioned in the first chapter as a joke.

  • robinn_IV [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    Progressive left’s worldview can be roughly summarized as “America bad, capitalism bad”. It’s barely any more nuanced than the GOP electorate, whose entire philosophy seems to be “Trump good, own the libs”.

    Heh, my ideology is so much more complex. See, I believe socialism bad, white capitalist countries good.

    • Tommasi [she/her, pup/pup's]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Painful amounts of projection.

      Neoliberals have zero nuance. If something is designated as an enemy by the state department, everything it does in every situation is bad, and everything negative someone says about it must be true. But it’s the people who think it’s more complicated who just don’t see nuance.

    • FnordPrefect [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      blob-no-thoughts: “My house is on fire! What should we do?!”

      Commie: “Spray water on it!”

      Fascist: “Spray gasoline on it!”

      blob-no-thoughts: “Their plans are both equally simple. Clearly they both are wrong!”

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        Neoliberals will note that, in the event of a grease fire, spraying water is actually bad. And they will use this as a point of evidence in their “Why we should defund the fire department” master’s thesis.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Heh, my ideology is so much more complex.

      Sort of the joke of neoliberalism. If you put out a 20,000 page white paper with the title “Socialism Bad, White Country Good” then you are correct, right up until someone issues a 21,000 page white paper that reads “DEBUNKED: Why White Country Sometimes Bad, but Socialism Even Worse Than Originally Thought”.

      Not surprising how many of these chucklefucks think AI is going to be a game-changer. After all, with a ChatBot I can produce white papers of infinite length! Try and refute that, stupid leftists. You can’t!

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      10 months ago

      Geocentrism is more complex than heliocentrism (at least in terms of things like orbital mechanics), and yet…

      It’s like these people have never heard of Occam’s Razor

  • cricbuzz [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    a lot of people that call themselves leftists just adopt “capitalism bad and culturally underdeveloped people good” as their core principle and go from there instead of reading the books

    Honestly, (aside from the racist framing) if you follow these rules you’ll probably be on the correct side of history 99% of the time

  • muddi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    leftists just adopt “capitalism bad and culturally underdeveloped people good” as their core principle and go from there instead of reading the books

    This is fucking racist

    The Avatar worldview. The James Cameron one, not the good one

    Yeah sure ATLA certainly has no black and white message about the consequences of industrialism and imperialism on pre-industrial societies.

    • SkingradGuard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      This exchange really exposes how disgusting liberals are

      leftists just adopt “capitalism bad and culturally underdeveloped people good” as their core principle and go from there instead of reading the books

      Lmao ghouls saying the quiet part out loud be less racist loser

      Do you like lgbt rights,freedom of speech,rights for women? All of these are signs of an objectively more developed culture.cultures that don’t have these are worse for their own people. Or do you think every cultural practice holds equal value? smuglord

      Using LGBT+ rights and women’s rights as a racist cudgel to justify neoliberal economic policy and imperialism, which directly contributes to these nation’s reactionary governments (and in many cases the imperialists fund and back reactionaries that PROMOTE these discriminatory governments). This is also ignoring all of the reactionary policies in the imperial core that are enacted by their favourite neoliberal politicians. These shitstains have no right to concern troll or virtue signal over minority rights and women’s rights when they don’t actually care about it.

      Liberals are deeply unserious.

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        Using LGBT+ rights and women’s rights as a racist cudgel to justify neoliberal economic policy and imperialism, which directly contributes to these nation’s reactionary governments (and in many cases the imperialists fund and back reactionaries that PROMOTE these discriminatory governments). This is also ignoring all of the reactionary policies in the imperial core that are enacted by their favourite neoliberal politicians. These shitstains have no right to concern troll or virtue signal over minority rights and women’s rights when they don’t actually care about it.

        It has just struck me that this is the same tactic Israel uses with antisemitism. It’s self-reinforcing because it causes antisemitism in foreign countries, which causes jews to support Israel because of the antisemitism.

        The LGBT and women’s rights cudgel the west uses to advance economic domination and power causes reactionary anti-lgbt behaviour in foreign countries, and in turn that homophobia and misogyny causes LGBT and women’s rights people to even more strongly support the west.

          • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            The difficulty here is discussing it without also looking like you’re anti-lgbt. Which is similar to the difficulty that previously existed with discussing zionism without also looking like you’re antisemitic. The immediate assumption most people go to is that you’re a raging homophobe.

            • ashinadash [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              10 months ago

              Can I get a “hell yeah” for nato bootlickers calling the ace trans lesbian a homophobe??? Real shit!

              I always open with “I do not want imperialists using the rights they won’t even give me as a cudgel against the global south”

              • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                We have the same shit going on as the jewish anti-zionists. This is actually pretty revelatory for me, I had not connected these things before but it’s so similar.

                EDIT: Like holy fuck there’s a reason we see “but they throw gays off rooftops” come up so often when it comes to palestine too. Same fucking thing. It even gets used FOR zionism itself.

                • ashinadash [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                  Yup! Zionists fuckin LOVE their homonationalism, look up Brand Israel and bring a puke bucket. Also watch Pride Denied: Homonationalism & The Future of Queer Politics!

                • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  10 months ago

                  I look forward to your future posting about this, it’s a very interesting connection! False consciousness bears some commonality across seemingly-disparate cases, turns out.

            • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]@hexbear.net
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              10 months ago

              i’m a removed, it’s easy for me. the correct response to “hm so you hate the LGBT Community??” is “shut the fuck up imperialist, if a queer joins the US army they should be hanged for treason.”

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        10 months ago

        Do you like lgbt rights,freedom of speech,rights for women? All of these are signs of an objectively more developed culture.

        I fucking hate this type of guy lenin-rage

      • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        The liberals think legal outcomes are the result of some nebulous idea of cultural practice!farquaad-point Every right we temporarily enjoy in capitalist countries was achieved by people chucking bombs or by threat of same. Do you enjoy working less than 21 hours a day and being paid in legal tender instead of company funbux? Then thank my ideological forebears for their service you fucking dweebs.

    • TheGenderWitch [she/her, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      leftists just adopt “capitalism bad and culturally underdeveloped people good” as their core principle and go from there instead of reading the books

      oh my god they said the quiet part out loud holy shit they’re being racist as fuck

    • drhead [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      If you go further down the thread, he is arguing back and forth with someone, and is basically proposing historical racism as an alternative to historical materialism.

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    So many comments claiming marx is wrong because they don’t understand what the “value” is in LTV. Some of them are literally saying he’s wrong because he doesn’t understand value is different to price which is lol

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    10 months ago

    I’m getting flashbacks to my mandatory Econ 101 course where the professor once asked me to leave the room because I had actually read Marx and could quote his actual words and thus got into a heated argument over what Communism was

    I wasn’t in trouble, but I was very much on the verge of throwing my backpack at a guy who kept insisting that welfare was communist

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    I’ll take “Ill-advised things to say at an independent bookstore” for 500, Alex

    Marxism is a way to view the world that has like 7 books written on it

    buzzer
    What is “words spoken immediately prior to getting crushed to death under a pile of books”?

  • WittyProfileName2 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    “You say Cuba is a democracy, but it’s been rated 3/10 burgers by the Freedom Burger Institute (partially funded by the CIA, partially funded by the American Christofascist caucus), check out this Wikipedia page.”

    no-choice

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    10 months ago

    I only read twenty pages of the first kapital.doesn’t the theory of value say that an item’s worth is increased by the amount of effort or time put into creating it?

    Then there are posters agreeing with that definition. Oh my god, these people haven’t read anything. Marx defines socially necessary labor time in chapter one, which this person claims to have read.

    Culturally underdeveloped

    Liberals breaking new grounds in ways to say racist things while using academic sounding jargon. Fuck these people. They think they’re so culturally advanced and yet neoliberalism and the west are the biggest enablers of genocide worldwide. Apparently drone strikes are a feature of culturally advanced people

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      Liberals breaking new grounds in ways to say racist things while using academic sounding jargon.

      It’s funny how much it’s just a synonym for “civilized” no matter how you read it, but anyone would rightly recognize “civilized” in this context to be a blatantly racist term

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    10 months ago

    boiled down to “you worked on a thing, so you deserve the entire revenue of that thing”, which obviously isn’t true. Like, if your employer lends you a hammer for free, shouldn’t he be entilted to some of the profits that the hammer creates?

    Good god the layers on this

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      10 months ago

      I like to hit people with some variation of:

      A couple years ago I hired a guy to patch my roof. Now I’m selling my house. How much of the proceeds should I give him?

      People start twisting themselves in knots real fast with that example. They generally understand and accept home ownership even if they can’t afford it but they simply can NOT empathize with equity holders otherwise.

      Did you not pay your roofer wtf

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      The seven atheistically ordained high priests of Marxism huddle around the sacred texts. Only seven scrolls left, containing the sum total of their knowledge. One of the faceless grey men reaches out to unfurl a weathered papyrus scroll, as to refresh his fading memory of one of the True Precepts. As he tenderly teases it apart, the forces of time prove too much and the paper crumbles into dust, gently blowing away on the wind like smoke.

      The Labor Theory of Value is no more.

      The seven robed figures let out a wail, dissonant and useless.