not a shitpost, bear with me Everyone has their ML blogpost and pasta ready whenever someone asks about Marxist economics on this board, and the conversations always delve deep into recursive, masturbatory diatribes and quotes from random people you probably never read in full. I'm guilty of this as well, just to be clear. What I'd like to do is issue a challenge that I think will be helpful to the posters as well as the lurkers.
Explain the basics of Marxist economics in 100 words or less and without using the words: - exploited - proletariat - class - bourgeois
Your boss is an asshole who profits off of your labor. You don't get paid what you deserve. Think about how expensive the things you and your fellow workers produce are and how little you receive in return. Your boss profits off of that even though he didn't contribute anything to the process except giving you tools to make that thing. Since you have the tools now, why don't you just get rid of the boss? And then you can keep producing that stuff for yourselves or to sell and use the money to help you, your workers, and your community by funding schools, hospitals, homes for all, and other necessary services.
Nathan Price
Capitalism bad >if you cant explain something in under 100 words its not worth my time
Josiah Anderson
I should add to the rules no appeals to emotion or childish name-calling like this
>implying I think this is the only thing worth my time. I also enjoy a good autistic blogpost but brevity is a skill that is missing here and I think could/should be developed more.
Jordan Sanchez
Then remove that quip and just have "Your boss profits off of your labor" and then the rest.
Owen Moore
Some people own stuff called means of production - MoP. All the other people don't. Those who own the MoP make those who don't own the MoP work for a wage. Thus, we call this last category workers. The ones who own the MoP make a ton of money by selling the goods and services produced by the workers, but in the end the workers got much less than this ton of money as their wages. And sho on and sho on.
Jayden Kelly
Your time is money. It takes time to make food (clothes, etc) that feeds people. It takes less time to make food for one person than the amount of time that person can work. Rich people pay for your food, not for your time. As a result, rich people make money by paying you for less time than the amount of time you work. Rich people beat each other by using machines to make things in less time. Machine time doesn't make money. More machinery = less human time = less money made per product. As a result, rich people are doomed.
Jeremiah Perez
that's the manifesto, not capital
Jace Thompson
What about synonyms tho
Wyatt Price
Some assholes tricked some other assholes into working for them, taking most of the profits for them. It all started when the first assholes got undue privileges and now all the cash is out of reach for most of the population.
Ill-gotten gains cross generationally ill-gotten.
Nathaniel Martinez
nigga, what is primitive accumulation
Luis Lopez
Nice.
Owen Sanchez
People own factory People who work in factory have to pay owner to use factory to make stuff Owner gets money without working Owner can buy more factory with money and so on People who dont own factory have no choice Owner never pays others enough for people to buy factory Small factory make more expensive product than big factory Big factory owner always wins Owner controls everything Owner gets many stuff even though he dont work many Not-owners dont like, not-owners want to become all-together owner Situation caused by making for selling, without stop this, same will happen again
The extraction of surplus-value through labour on privately held property, utilising privately held means of production. That class propelled to sell its labour-power (not labour; this would be slavery) as a commodity to the propertied class in exchange for a wage. A social relation to production, e.g. proletarian. That class which privately owns the means of production and employs labour-power in return for a wage.
i want more stuffs. i don't have the stuffs. this means there is a system put in place to keep me from having the stuffs. communism is the system in which i will have the stuffs. if the communism is there its providing of the stuffs will solve everything.
Logan Lewis
The study of society must be based on the study of the way that a society reproduces itself through the division of labor. Contemporary societies are reproduced by a division of labor performed by a system of social relations between producers their products. This system is called capitalism. In capitalist societies the product of society is not owned by the producers of society's wealth, because the means of production of that society are not owned by the producers who use them. Neither then is the system of social relations controlled by society, but by a small class of owners.
To sell your labour you would literally be selling yourself; to literally lease yourself as a chattel slave for a definite amount of time until you are free. Instead, what you sell is your labour-power; you enter the tacit agreement to receive a wage for every verified hour worked. You may otherwise leave at any time. That which keeps you into needing to do this all the time (why we call it wage slavery), is that there is a propertied class which violently defends any other alternative mode of production with different social relations to production (e.g. a communist one, where there is no exclusive right to private property at all, hence creating a completely free association of producers). How it came to do so? It developed itself out of the shell of a prior mode of production and vested itself as class and organised as class for itself (which we call the class struggle), and enforced its mode of production through a developed, more robust, now generalized system of commodity production.
Other user already explained better, but what you are selling as a worker is your ability to work for a certain amount of time in exchange for a wage, not yourself for a certain amount of time or the product of your labour created in that amount of time. If you were doing those 2 things you'd be a slave or a communist, because on the one hand you'd have sold yourself and on the other hand you'd realise that you're getting fucked but do nothing about it. The lack of a distinction between labour and labour-power is a very good way of obfuscating class relations.
John Gonzalez
"I'll be a retarded fascist who doesn't understand the difference between 2 definitions of words"
Caleb Clark
Don't post an answer that could only reveal the fact that you haven't even read the most basic amount of Marx. You don't have to use the reply function. Priority is much higher on actually reading a fucking book after all this time.
No worries, It's a little bit more complicated than that and there are types of wage labour that aren't intuitive like Piecemeal Wages but if you read you'll start to grasp it.
There was actually a video I watched the other day which is a reading group of Kliman's Reclaiming Marx's Capital with a bunch of Podcasters, the Distinction between Labour and Labour Power comes up there and they discuss it in a pretty simple way with some good analogies. If you don't like Leftcoms I'd steer clear & it's pretty long but here's the series, if you ever get around to reading Kliman or if you just want to watch other people discuss it and explain marxist concepts it's actually pretty good, most reading group videos are fucking awful youtube.com/watch?v=zSN6AvxUYOk (you can find the other parts on the channel, it's an ongoing series)
Landon Howard
Human labor, along with natural resources, creates and reproduces our social conditions. The products of labor have both a use value and an exchange value - within the capitalist mode of production, the latter is prioritized. Until a mode of production can arise that prioritizes the creation of use values, human labor and resources will never be utilized as efficiently and socially beneficially as they could be.
Workers work to produce products, but get only a portion of the profit of the product, while the business owner gets the majority, effectively stealing the workers profit. The value of an object is determined on the amount of time required to create it.
Jordan Anderson
Grug cant use factory to make stuff freely. Have to give stuff to owner (rent) or work for owner and only get certain amount of stuff but have to promise to make much more stuff.
Hudson Foster
Grug can't use factory to make stuff freely under communism either.
