Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 day agoThis is nonsense, the only part you got correct is that those who read through Capital generally have an interest in a better world. Neither Marx nor Lenin advocated “doing the opposite” to get to communism, both argued for the establishment of a worker state to gradually collectivize all of the means of production and distribution. Historically, this method has been enormously beneficial for the working classes, while breing quite scary for landlords, capitalists, slavers, and fascists.
I’m also not at all understanding what you mean by Marx being “convincing with his way of argumentation (at least if you’re a bit stupid).” What would an intelligent person, by your estimation, take fault with in Marx?
What would an intelligent person, by your estimation, take fault with in Marx?
The dictatorship of the proletariat was a horribly bad idea. It’s a dictatorship. And brings the consequences of a dictatorship with it. I would dare to blame Lenin and also Marx for that crap.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is a democratic state for the proletariat, and dictatorship against capitalists, fascists, landlords, and slavers. It’s the socialist equivalent to liberal democracy, which de facto is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
timdrake@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
Capital rests on the argument ~that the fact qualitatively different (in terms of use values) commodities are exchanged for each other in different quantities requires a quality they share in common which only differs in quantity from one commodity to the next, and Marx posits that the only quality this could be is being products of labor. Yet this is very clearly not something that all commodities have in common, and that a thing’s status as a commodity and its ability to be exchanged for other commodities has nothing to do with its being a product of labor. The only way Marx’s argument can be accepted is if you start with the presupposition that commodities are valued by the labor required to produce them.
How this happens that commodities are exchanged at their “value” is a complete mystery by the way, since Marx says it has nothing to do with the conscious considerations of either the buyer or the seller.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 49 minutes ago
This is not clear at all. Elaborate, please.
Why not? Are you saying that the utility of a commodity to someone does not change whether or not it was made with labor? This doesn’t really matter, though, the point of the Law of Value is that commodities are socially produced, and socially distributed, which normalizes their price around their values. Arguments like the “mud pie” don’t apply, because mud pies are neither useful nor difficult to make.
Incorrect, the exchange-value that price fluctuates around is representative of the value in a commodity. Another way to look at it is that the value of a commodity is the sum of its inputs, which can be reduced to labor and natural resources.
Marx is correct, though this is no mystery. Commodities are social products, and are socially exchanged. What’s universal to goods bought and sold is that they require natural resources and human labor to create them, thus capitalism in being a social process acts as a price-finder for commodities, all based on inputs and outputs.