Marx

I don't really see "owning the libs" type shit as being a significantly different formulation from any other "false consciousness"

As we all know, it was only poor people who voted for Trump.

tbf this kind of thing has been extensively thrashed out in adorno vs. kracauer/benjamin and the rich literature following them, all of which depends on having marx as (one) starting point, so we might not really be able to talk about it without marx. but i still think the point stands that the "manifesto" and "capital" are two different works, and if you gripe about the convoluted academic prose in the one that's aimed at a convoluted academic conversation, as evidence that he couldn't relate to the working class, i feel like that needs to be supplemented in the ways that have been asked for upthread: which specific points in the theory would be different if he did not have as much privilege (however much it was)? why?

the language is also convoluted because it's translated from german, of course, but it's fair to say that when he wanted to write in a different register he could. i've been reading marshal berman's /all that is solid melts into air/ and he's otm about the lyricism and rhetorical force of the manifesto, which now sounds like MLK to my ears.

not sure we really need another "soviet union C/D?" discussion but i will go ahead and call any regime that kills tens of millions of people a failure, versus the admittedly external, a priori standard of "murder is bad." that applies whether its initial stated goal is "we will create a socialist utopia" or "we will kill tens of millions of people." we can argue about the causality of that failure as much as any other ("did the electric car fail because of conspiring powerful interests or because the technology wasn't there?") but surely it was a failure. not sure that has much bearing on marx though since the history of the 20th century suggests a range of other common denominators for mass murder at this scale, of which the development of totalitarian bureaucratic states looms largest.

good points Doc

what I meant is that ideas about fx the dictatorship of the proletariat seem free flying fantasy compared to Marx' economic analysis

a relevant point about the style and prose of Capital is that it's actually relatively accessible, despite clearly written for an academic audience. he throws in lots of little witticisms and jokes, some of which i had to read a footnote to understand because they were inside-19th-century-philosopher-jokes, but still. generally it is difficult to read because of the ideas it contains (and the concepts that require defining, at least for me) rather than the way in which he wrote it, and that comes through even via translation.

thesis 11: marx/engels are the lennon/mccartney to hegel's elvis. sober or otherwise i prefer the hits to their deep cuts

class conflict as historical model showing a lot fewer cracks these days than, say, newtonian mechanics

― difficult listening hour, Monday, September 17, 2018 4:09 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a weird thing to say. newtonian mechanics is as essential as quantum or relativistic mechanics. they apply under different conditions.

This was in the lobby of a chain hotel I stayed in

https://i.imgur.com/Ptoj1XC.jpg

The internet has done so much damage we can never know or measure.

so just coming from watching the first episode of the norm macdonald has a show show and i couldn't help but notice david letterman is looking more like a malnourished karl marx

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the question. If you're asking whether he accounts for the fact that machines increase productivity and enable the same person working for the same number of hours to produce more goods, yes, of course he does. But I doubt that he would frame it as "labor-saving."

― Fedora Dostoyevsky (man alive), Saturday, September 15, 2018 9:26 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

labor-saving is like, it used to take 3 capital and 3 labor to produce one unit of output, but with new technology it takes 2 machines and 1 hour of work. both became more productive but labor has a smaller relative increase in marginal productivity along constant factor shares. so in the long-run, output relies on a tiny sliver of labour relative to capital, and the wage rate relative to the return on capital goes to zero. there's parts of marx where he sounds very labor-saving. for example, from wage labor and capital:

But we have already seen that, with every advance in the use of machinery, the constant component of capital, that part which consists of machinery, raw material, etc., increases, while the variable component, the part laid out in labour-power, decreases.

tbc, i asked because you said

one thing that strikes me a lot now is how bad a lot of the common criticisms of Marx's theories are, like I'll see one tossed off by some purported economist or political scientist and I'll think, "Um, no, he addresses that a few chapters into Vol 1."

and 'marx thought technology was labor-saving' is a common criticism of marx often tossed off by purported economists :)

Quite a few Capital reading groups springing up lol

Time for quarantine Capital reading groups.https://t.co/M9XTfhol3n

— Prada-Meinhof (@Prada_Meinhof) April 8, 2020

Grimes in Los Angeles today.

Photography by Jvshvisions pic.twitter.com/b2kemGSYhU

— GRIMES CHARTS (@GrimezszCharts) October 2, 2021

some cool ideas in the communist manifesto but i’m more into crypto gaming UBI pic.twitter.com/u0BdNH4tmV

— james hennessy (@jrhennessy) October 3, 2021

thats right

Wasn't gamer UBI the plot to one of the first Black Mirror episodes