Greetings from a certain corner of the anti-capitalist right. I've stuck my head in here intermittently for a while, though this is the first thread I've made. What I want to ask you, Zig Forums, is why Marxism? But before that, I want to see how much we've got in common. First up, I mentioned anti capitalism. I think that the Marxist critique of Capitalism is on target. It is exploitative. Where I believe I diverge is that I don't think that people owning property is necessarily (unbearably?) exploitative, but the continued centralisation of ownership is, and that's what Capitalism unavoidably encourages, and accelerates at an unbelievable rate.
Second, I've seen some discussion of things like labour vouchers. Why these? The labour theory of value doesn't work, Marx was wrong about it, but that doesn't invalidate his critique. People's labour is valuable if people are valuable, but that doesn't mean that we need to value things based on how long someone spent on it surely.
Third, I've spoken to socialists for a while over the years and I've noticed that many of them say that the feudal system was less exploitative than the Capitalist one. This has won me over. While the serfs and workers were poorer, they also had more freedom. Is this view also held here?
Now my question; why Marxism? It has the same roots as liberalism, and seems to be to be a liberal rebellion/revolution against liberalism itself (and liberalism's child capitalism). I'm not saying that Marxism should be discarded out of hand, but surely there's a way to move beyond it, to see that it's incomplete?
When I say it has the same roots, I'm talking about the enlightenment, when Europeans decided that morality was subordinate to man and that the individual was superlative to everything. This is the cause of a lot of cancers, including capitalism. I don't see how Marxism really avoids these, since most Marxists I've seen seem totally content resting upon the same axioms.
I think the 'outsider' left and right have a lot more in common than we think and that we're prevented from really interacting by the left/right labels, and a few liberal derived bugbears. I hope you all take this in good faith, I'm open to other questions about my positions. Maybe we have more in common.
I havn't found an anti-capitalist framework of thought that offers the same as Marxism. I know there are anti-capitalist tendencies on the right, but I don't think they are sufficient.
There is more to it. Marx critiques capitalism holistically, the whole embryo of capitalism is the value-form, commodity production. You could abolish exploitation by making firms co-ops, but then they would exploit themselves on the market. Other issues with capitalism is stuff like imperialism, and alienation. Only in communism humans can go back to their species essence. There is an economic critique of capitalism in Marxism, and a philosophical one.
Marx suggests labour vouchers because they can't be transferred to another person and expire. You can't accumulate them like money-capital. The USSR and friends did not have labour vouchers, but implemented a system in which you couldn't turn money into capital.
The problem is you approach this with a neoclassical angle, that relies on complete subjectivity. The LTV has not been debunked, because it is not supposed to tell you the exact same price of a product, but rather analyses the underlying motions of a capitalist economy. Watch this: youtube.com/watch?v=emnYMfjYh1Q The LTV does not come from Marx by the way, Aristoteles already had a primitive form of it, and Smith and Ricardo formulated it.
I don't think so. I don't know how you can measure exploitation in feudal times, but the great feature of capitalism is that it develops the productive forces and granting us the benefits of an industrial society. There were many shitty things about feudalism. NRx type of guys usually like Marx's analysis of capitalism but don't think we can move beyond, so they just want to move back.
Marxism didn't stop after the death of Marx. Lenin etc. contributed important aspects of it, and I would argue that Marxism didn't originate with liberalism, but rather with the enlightenment overall. Marxism is certainly not liberalism, please don't buy into the burger rethoric where socialists are equated with liberals. I mean you can totally adhere to Marxism without all the liberal identity politics. Marx himself was sectarian and expelled "liberals" from the First International, so was Lenin.
I think the hardest sell would be materialism, there is no Marxism without it. Materialism not in sense of being "materialistic", but to acknowledge that everything in the world is derived from matter.
Adrian Sullivan
Forgot this: Marxism distinguishes between private property (means of production) and personal property (your house, your car, your computer). It's literally in the Manifesto.
Anthony Hughes
I don't think you've read Marx at all. Property isn't in itself exploitative. It becomes so when it has potential as a means of production. Read: private property/personal property
No argument.
Meaningless nonsense. How do you measure an individual's "value" ?
Absolutely not. Capitalism is much better than feudalism in terms of human freedom. It was a bourgeois revolution after all. Serfs were literally born into bondage and couldn't do shit except farm their land due to being bonded to it. Those that surrendered this became social outcasts, much worse than even homeless people today.
What do you even mean by liberalism here ?
Jesus christ…
What are you even talking about ? Are you American ? Europeans are not a single group of people and even so, morality as a basis for control is a huge fundamental part of bourgeois social engineering.
No. Nationalists/patriots/etc. are all scum and deserve a bullet, each and every one of them. You've even admitted it yourself you sympathize with capitalism, even if you seem to recognize flaws within it. Typical snake in the grass. Go fuck yourself
Brandon Flores
howtoalienatecuriouspeople.jpg All socialist countries had a form of socialist patriotism, which wasn't chauvinistic.
Ian Harris
And where are they now ?
Samuel Morris
It certainly wasn't the reason for their dissolution. If you really love your people, you want socialism for them.
Jonathan Harris
The Marxist LTV isn't a proposal about how we should value things. It's a theory which aims to explain equilibrium prices under capitalism. Adam Smith called them "natural prices", they are prices reached when supply and demand are at equilibrium, like some kind of average over time. He thought that if a chair as an EP of 10 and a table an EP of 20, it's because you need twice the work to create a table. Ricardo refined the theory and then Marx did too. Watch this for more info : youtube.com/watch?v=6oQ02sTO6PM
Thomas Scott
Which were the first countries to demand independence from the USSR and why ?
Why did Yugoslavia collapse into civil war ?
Why did GDR dissolve and join with vassal Germany ?
I suppose it was all "the wrong type of nationalism" though, isn't it ? A misguided bourgeois nationalism (as if there is any other type) which if only it had the blessing of TRUE HONEST socialism, it would be on the right track. Give me a break
Josiah Sanders
Guess I should namefag.
Yes, I agree. The commodification of goods (and humans now) is a defining characteristic of capitalism, and it's bad,
I don't equate the two. When use Liberalism, I DON'T mean it in the American sense. The American sense of the word is fucking retarded. I mean it in the old liberal sense. I just should have said "enlightenment". I'm quite aware of how a lot of Marxists got pwned by neoliberalism, which is why it's hard to figure out what's going on sometimes. (Not that the right was immune to this either, in fact I'd say the right got almost completely annihilated by neoliberalism.) Liberalism was the direct outcome of the enlightenment. That's why we call the modern political mainstream (neo-)liberalism. At least where I hang around. Anyone talking about cultural Marxism in my circles gets the verbal shit beaten out of them, we talk about cultural liberalism instead. Anyway, this is basically my critique. The enlightenment was a disaster, it failed in its main objective (to define morality by pure reason), so it seems obvious to me that anything based upon it, and Marxism is based upon it, has critical flaws.
Never said I'd read marx, just talked to marxists and socialists. Or people who claimed to be thus. Some of them seemed to regard all private property as bad. I wasn't sure, hence my qualification of "where I believe I diverge…"
No
Not what you think I mean, clearly. See above, I hope that answers your question.
David Scott
Stopped reading there.
Fuck off, we have nothing in common, Nazi.
Parker Bennett
Sorelianism and/or Blanquism is superior.
Bentley Nguyen
Based ancom
Lucas Lopez
I guess so, since my view of economics is neoclassical because that's where my main reading is. Interesting, never heard this before. I'll watch that video.
Agreed there were many shitty things about it. As for how you can measure exploitation, peasants had more free time. Isn't that better? Certainly seems to be less exploited if you're spending less of your time working for an overlord/manager/ceo.
It seems to have a bit. Let's consider, by contrast, Aristotle. Aristotelianism didn't stop after his death, and is arguably still alive today in a way. However you don't see people discussing Aristolte's metaphysical biology. Aristotle was just one man and while he created an excellent philosophical framework, there were flaws. He was just one limited man after all. His conception of the "good life for man" (which could ONLY be achieved in the Athenian polis) and his metaphysical biology are parts of Aristotelian that were discarded along the way. It took over 200 years for Aristotle to be successfully integrated into Christian Philosophy, but it was done so successfully by a series of philosophers and theologians. It seems to me, as our AnCom friend demonstrates that Marxism and Marxists continually have a "take it all or leave it" stance in regards to Marxism. And while some may add to it, such as Lenin and Mao, there's no real integration.
I do have another question; Are any hierarchies justified?
Nathaniel Scott
When you start making the point that labour is not what produces value within a capitalist economy, we all know which side you're going to take when it comes to blows between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Go suck capitalist cock somewhere else.
Playing to stereotypes are you? That's exactly what I was talking about. All nuance is lost on you, you just crush everything down to you vs capitalists. If I disagree with you, then I MUST be a capitalist. Fuck off. Did you not read? It's in the OP. But god forbid I have a need to actually be critical of something to learn more about it, or think that maybe it's not complete, or it's only a partial truth or something like that.
Nathaniel Collins
You seem to be conflating economic value with some arbitrary moral value but I expect little more from nationalist or so-called "third-position" goons.
Luke Hall
This was probably the dumbest thing in your OP, so it's sad you repost it without elaborating on it even though another user already called out the nonsense.
Jordan Flores
To add, you would have been right if you had flipped it around and said "people are valueable if their labour is valueable". At least that's what we can deduce about the capitalist economy through the lens of the LTV.
Jack Taylor
The Enlightenment is the source of all ideologies except for absolute monarchism and absolute theocracies. Hell it’s the source of fascism and other far-right ideologies to a degree. Unless you believe God’s law is above all else or support an absolute monarchy you are to a degree influenced by the enlightenment.
The Centralization of private property is inevidble because of the mechanisms of capital accumulation. The only way to end it is to accelerate through it and beyond into socialism.
When I heard this I thought of someone who supports central planning but under a military regime that has an expansionist and ultranatioanlist foreign policy.
Slightly deviating here (and I'll sage for it) but what the fuck is the deal with Nick Land ? I've downloaded his shit to give it a read and have listened to some interviews with him but he speaks like the most pretentious yet strangely soft spoken academic I've heard. He uses such cryptic language (mix of psychoanalytics and Hegelian abstractions) that I can't even decipher it except as "fascism and no brown people also technolemgies is good and chinese are also good because dey are rasiss and tyrants ;-DDDD"
Xavier Clark
Finally finished watching that video. That's very convincing. I hadn't come across this before. I've watched his Transformation problem video too, which is an exceptional. Thanks for linking that, user. I'm going to tentatively go with the Labour theory of value being true, while I process what I've learned.
Also yes, I'm a patriot. Nations seem to be just about the largest size group of people who can share common interests and goals, and even then just barely, when they're homogeneous. I think every ethnic group on earth has the right to self determination to the best of the circumstances available to it. Though I do struggle a bit with wondering if it's morally acceptable, or an obligation to limit the self destructive tendencies of others. I certainly believe that some evils should not be tolerated, for example, Rome's destruction of Carthage was fully justified. Carthage had to be destroyed for the evil of horrific child and infant sacrifice. The destruction of the Aztec civilisation which also practised incredible levels of human sacrifice was no moral evil either.
Henry Richardson
wew strasser himself actually went and said it
James Johnson
Definitely agreed. Fascism is rooted in the enlightenment. I've heard the opposite, unless you mean something else by absolute monarchy.
Yep. I'd add accumulation of human capital too. The capitalists want to concentrate human capital, drain it from everywhere, as much as they can to maximally exploit it, that's why I'm very suspicious of open borders and borderlessless. I'm happy to accelerate through it, but I'm not entirely sure that nation-less socialism is the end state, as I said nations seem to be the largest possible cooperative units, and even then that's only for certain groups that have reached a level of development previously, others are still stuck at the tribal level, and simply putting them in a national system doesn't change that.
There's almost no way to say "anti capitalist" and "right" together without people suspecting you're a ``not socialist``. But I'm not.
Isaiah Williams
In a way you are right. Marxism starts out with the question: Why is it that liberalism cant fulfill its promises? It approves of liberalism discarding of superstition, morality, it approves largely of the liberal ideas, or to be more accurate with the ideals of the enlightenment. But Marxism looks around at the world and sees these new problems (and by 'problems' we mean general misery, apocalyptic wars, alienation from humanity and degradation of the human spirit, inequality beyond measure), and basically tries ascertain why this is.
Marxism at base is nothing more than the demand for the actual realization of enlightenment ideals. Of course it develops into something quite different and independent, but thats were it starts out. Absolutely true. The diagnosis is one which really harshly disagrees with your right-wing beliefs. Marx concluded that in fact not ideas, religions, morality, or any kind of ideology that guide human history, but that they are in a way mere products of a deeper conflict - class struggle of course. Im gonna let Marx make the case with excerpts from 'The German Ideology' : the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men. subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.
nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by its production and its internal and external intercourse. How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labour has been carried.
Jose Kelly
continuing, sorry for the formatting it screwed up somehow
Aaron Robinson
Shit I'm late Because it's just not an economic theory but a sublime philosophical system, all other criticism of capitalism fall down because they can't see beyond what is already known about it while marxism has the tools to explain where it goes. This is the issue I am talking about, you think of yourselves as an anti capitalist but still can't conceive an alternative to it, many rightists who think of themselves as anti capitalist are still capitalist but they just dislike they current glottalization trend. If rightist anticapitalists had their way they will have to return to glottalization soon enough because it's a necessity for capitalism. Marxism doesn't want to collectivize your toothbrush no matter how much we meme that. Vouchers were proposed by Proudhon who was later criticized by Marx, most marxists do not approve of such thing Also the LTV has not been refuted. I think not and your idea of freedom under feudalism maybe a little skewed. Marxism does come out of many ideas born during the enlightenment but Marxism ditches many of them to take one step ahead.
liberalism is rightism and don't pretend otherwise. Likes private property = Rightism Doesn't like private property = Leftism It's really this simple. Marxism doesn't even pretend that morality is real, that's why it takes one step ahead of the enlightenment. Marxism is a materialist philosophy while liberalism is idealist.
Because you're not familiar with later marxists or current marxists. And it's not an all or nothing approach but if you reject LTV it because you're a liberal on the very bottom. Hierarchy =/= Organization Fascies want hierarchies to be a game of dominance and submission and not a necessary division of labor
Value =/= Price Value in manufacture =/= value in money.
"Nations" are not real, they're just a configuration of material conditions that seems homogeneous. "Self destructive tendencies" AKA "People having fun without my permission" exists because of capitalism comodifying things that didn't exists centuries ago, your concern should not be what people is doing with themselves but the fact they're being sold and charged such ideas.
Because nations are a set of material conditions, please stop attributing imaginary stuff to such things. I may think more time to replay back
All of this leads to the conclusion that under Capitalism, the dominant form of property is private property (this doesn't mean your toothbrush or couch, it means capital, in a modern sense private property mainly means investment). And the Capitalist society is thus, through the increasing and unavoidable centralization of capital in fewer and fewer hands "split up into two classes, into two great hostile camps directly facing each other". The great majority of the population, the Proletariat, will eventually win this conflict and abolish private property by collectivizing it. As the proletariat will then be the only class left, there will also be no more class conflict, therefore the state with all of its suppressive forces will be no longer necessary and wither away. Then you have full communism.
Zachary Sanders
When Marxists use the word "exploitative" it has a technical meaning, namely that during production the workers are being paid less than the value of their output. (I.e. you work 8 hours, you're paid the equivalent of 5, the capitalist takes 3 and divides it up how he likes.) This sounds odd at first but there are a number of proofs that could be made. You're right. The overall trend in capitalism is for increased concentration and centralization of capital, leading to growing inequality. There are counter-tendencies but they only seem to hold back centralization in the short-term. Even in the USA there was (a hundred years ago!) the awareness that large trusts and so on needed to be broken up to keep the system from being ruined. Eh, maybe in a technical sense. The drive to increase the surplus under capitalism allowed for rising standards of living, so I don't think anyone would want to go back to a feudal system. It has too much explanatory power to ignore. I agree that Marxists should be attempting to move Marxism into the 21st century but it's a difficult process largely because matters of theory are so tied with politics that it becomes very contentious. There are multiple "Marxisms" floating around that are incompatible with one another and even interpretations of Marx's analysis are not fully agreed upon by Marxist theorists. I think this sort of ties into the problem I mentioned above. Marxists are still untangling a lot of central problems and haven't been able to develop alternative systems of morality, ethics, etc. Maybe this won't even be possible until a new society has already been established.
My professor at university said that Marx is the best and anything else is transphobic.
Jonathan Jenkins
This is often thrown around by aut-right circles, but anyone who has actually studied humanities at university knows that it's very rare to encounter a literal Marxist professor. Marxism is not in vogue in academic circles and professors have been cuckolded by bourgeois "socialism" (i.e. succdemism) or some non-Marxist lil-bit-a-capitalism-but-not-too-much ideology or another
Liam Murphy
The right has no idea what capitalism is. The nazis think that it is when jews do things, and the various disciples of the Austrian School think that it is based on Tinkerbell magic where if you believe hard enough and clap your hands it will be okay. Then you have the basic bitch liberals who think that capitalism is human nature.
Because it includes a compehensive systemic analysis of capitalism. Capitalism is the status quo, and marxist theory dissects it, lays it bare.
Says who? Mises? The labor theory of value is what all classical economics is based on, and it remains the best model for determining the nature of the value of commodities.
brb work
Noah Ross
lol Outside of hypothetical models such as market socialism, property is centralized and its existence results in the exploitation of labor regardless of who owns and controls it. They take the place of money in a revolutionary or early post-revolutionary society. They've largely been abandoned by the left. Marx's critique relies on the LTV and it wasn't proven wrong, rather price was conflated with value and the "socially necessary" was ignored so they could make the mudpie strawman. Even if serfs got more free time than workers it is irrelevant because we are not going back to feudalism barring an apocalyptic disaster. I'm not, Marxism has ceased to mean anything and calling yourself such can mean you're anything from a pretentious ancom to an anti-burger capitalist. I'm a communist who values Marx's critique of political economy. Socialism comes from liberalism and rejects core tenets of liberalism.
Andrew Sullivan
Holy shit this is one of the worst serious threads I've ever had the displeasure of seeing. I'm not going to contribute to it I'm just going to bash it because at this point it deserves nothing more. OP had a confusing post that shows he doesn't know about Marx to bother asking why people might follow him, and asked this on a predominantly alternative to Marx board. So the replies obviously ended up just as horrible and no one knows what they're talking about. Tongue my anus.
Yeah, the only marxists at university are in the anthropology department or, on very rare occasions, in the history department.
Isaac Price
Absolute Monarchy is the only ideology OUTSIDE of the enlightenment.
Yes, but what you don’t understand is how primitive accumulation of small farmers and artisans causes it, and you suggest we return to such a state of small property owners like America during the Articles of Confederation, however a return to a past state would inedibly lead us to where we are now.
Nations have existed sense forever, it is not the goal of (most) socialists to abolish them. What we want to get rid of is the relatively recent politicalization of them. Also what many right-wingersdon’t understand is that nations break apart, bend and merge back to together. Just look at how the proto-germans broke into Scandinavians and the south-germans who broke into Prussians, Bavarians, Saxons, etc. But then merged back together into the modern German Nation. Modern Nations are constantly changing, this change is neither good or bad, but inedible.
Nathan Sullivan
You may not want to make retarded statements that bring down your entire argument and make you look bad within the first two sentences or ever actually.
Landon Davis
Before you start gushing on a bit too much about the nobility of Roman civilization, you should read this book. Roman history was largely written by the upper class and for the upper class; ignoring the suffering on a massive scale of its slave and proletarian population for the enrichment of its oligarchs. It's a pretty easy read, give it a go.
Rome had significant social and class-collaborative movements, meanwhile Carthage was literally an imperialist power exporting merchant capital and using the antique equivalent of Blackwater to crush their enemies.
Camden Gutierrez
sage goes in all fields
Owen Diaz
We confirmed that Carthage sacrificed infants. It had to be destroyed, reform was not an option. Rome, whatever its moral state, was good enough to see that. I brought this up specifically because I wonder if our civilisation has sunk so low that it too must be destroyed because reform is impossible.
I guess I don't. I haven't necessarily suggested that, and even were I do, America pre-union wouldn't be far enough back. Not if we UNDO THE ENLIGHTENMENT :^) That's good to hear. It is too easy over 'my side' to think every socialist is a globalist. I agree, nations are not absolute. They also haven't existed since forever, that's part of why they're not absolute.
Zachary Cooper
Well god damn.
Asher Fisher
Blanquism is retarded
Christian Nguyen
I never understood the neo-right's desire to roll back the enlightenment. Like, do people really think it was a bad thing that reason, science, secularism, and forms of government other than feudalism and absolutism were bad? Was it bad to abolish the privileges of the catholic church?
A majority of socialist orgs and publications are run by what you'd call globalists. The rank-and-file tends to be different and often keeps their mouths shut on the issue.
Adrian Thompson
Spook from the 19th century Spook Spook Spook I’m sure this is meant in a spooked way Spook Spook Spook spook
Fictional entities which didn’t even exist until the 19th century. Who common interests? A spook such as “the people”? What if my interests do not align with the common interests and goals of the People™ Rights do not exist All depends on what you mean by this. If you mean “fun” – yes it is a spook
Ian Walker
Reported for spam
Kayden Bailey
Sorry you are so soft, I wasn't trying to insult you.
Every fucking time with you school children. Look, I know you haven't learned how to research yet and what constitutes as evidence for an argument but please try to speak in more than images you merely downloaded into your little Zig Forums folder which have no real citations whatsoever
We had those before the enlightenment. The enlightenment turned them cancerous. The idea we didn't have them before the enlightenment is part of why the enlightenment is terrible too.
