I know a lot about socialism/communism from the accounts of the famous Austrians. It seems unfair to them that I would judge them based off their opponent’s account.* So I would like to know how marxists etc formulate their theories.
Like, how do anarcho communists try to address the issue of state monopoly?
Just looking for education… I want to understand how they would articulate things so I don’t get blindsided by something I haven’t encountered before.
unsurprisingly I am by no means a marxist but in my experience I think that marx articulates things using the method of hegel (well maybe not people disagree on this) which is dialecticism -from what I gather -a way of analyzing the nature of things by seeing what relation it holds to other things (?).
Here are some strange sayings of the marxists that I don’t understand but seem to illustrate my point:
money has an internal contradiction because it serves as a measure of value for all things yet it is also a thing. It determines the prices of things yet there is a price to mining it. Its use-value consists in constituting exchange value. (I don’t think hegelians believe in the law of non-contradicition so they must mean something else by the word contradiciton.)
capitalist economists only see the surface appearances and not the essence of things (again, don’t hegelians believe that the essence of things =the sum of their surface appearances?)
marxist theories of the present economy are only about the present economy and not about economics in general. (This seems to fit with the historicism of the marxists and their contention that being is an obsolete concept to be replaced by becoming.)
The transformation problem is apparently not a problem. (don’t know how they come to this conclusion, I think they say marx wasn’t an economist he was a social revolutionary and so his objective analysis of capitalism is secondary to his social theory.)
From engels (paraphrasing): “…it [one of his/socialists] may be false in a formal economic point of view but from the point of view of the development of world history it is correct.”
The development of class consciousness seems to be synonymous with the becoming or birth of objective consciousness not indexed to classes. (a classless society?).
From the communist manifesto: They say that there will be no more truth or beauty or religion in communism. I say of course since the new society will be so different from the past (without workers and employers) that the ideas of this society will be radically new.
They emphasize sublimation of the previous order into the new order except without the previous era’s faults. Which is why communism is supposed to be capitalism without the hypocrisy of profit…I think.
what I meant is that, from what I’ve read (and remember I’m no marxian expert), the value of all things is based on socially necessary labor value. So capitalists make profits only by working their workers longer or by paying them less wages ( I believe this is what is called absolute and relative surplus value respectively). And also, capitalists never make profits from anyother source such as buying low and selling high and the marxists consider it ridiculous (Idk why) that capitalists make money from allocating resources to their highest valued ends. Yet marx also excepts supply-demand theory in a qualified way [*-)]. The hypocrisy part is that capitalists say that work (labour) is the source of value and people are always saying that you have to work hard to play hard and etc. But in reality capitalism is about a few fatcats being enriched off the workers whereas communism gives the worker his due wages. (I don’t believe this of course).
You don’t understand them because they are nonsense meant to confuse you. They think you are a rube who will accept that they must be smarter than you if they make nonsensical statements using big words. I had a long post written to show that in detail about your quotes from them, but why waste time?
Ever notice how true things are very clear and simple?
Examples:
From physics: E=MC^2. A profound truth with literally earthshaking consequences. Each piece of that equation may need definition, but the definitions are clear and precise. There is no double talk.
From AE: If you print tons and tons of paper money and start spending it, prices will go up and up. Eventually no one will accept that money as payment. Anyone who has that money in his wallet will then have nothing.
Contrast this with Obama’s version: If you print tons and tons of money, you will save the economy from disaster.
Keynes had to write a lot of double talk to defend Obama’s view. Ever see Samuelson, his star pupil describing it? “It is a badly written book, poorly organized; any layman who, beguiled by the author’s previous reputation, bought the book was cheated of his 5 shillings. It is not well suited for classroom use. It is arrogant, bad-tempered, polemical, and not overly generous in its acknowledgments. It abounds in mares’ nests and confusions… In short, it is a work of genius.”
I dunno. All the other geniuses write clear understandable stuff. Note that he had a reputation for writing clear understandable books till then, as Samuelson mentions. What happened? Did he start overflowing with such genius he could no longer spell out a clear chain of reasoning?
Yeah that is what they say. Utter nonsense of course.
If I am a smart cookie and write an interesting novel that everybody wants to read and are happily willing to pay handsomely for it, who got ripped off? Where is the exploited laborer?
The value of things isnt how much hard wok was put into making it. Its value is how much people are willing to pay for it. It’s value may thus be different in different places, even though the same amount of labor is needed to produce it.
When the Indians sold Manhatten Island for a few beads, why didn’t they ask “Hey how many hours of labor did you put into making those beads? We’ll give you $24 for them, tops.” Obviously cause they couldn’t care less. They really wanted those beads, there’s plenty of land everywhere, they are getting the bargain of their lives.