• KobaCumTribute [she/her]English
    54•16 days ago

    It’s always gotta be “Marx didn’t consider [thing discussed in the literal first chapter of Capital]” too. Like literally every single time without exception.

    • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]English
      29•16 days ago

      “I bet Marx couldn’t have foreseen…” Then they list some new thing. Sometimes if you’re really lucky they just talk about consumer products.

      Actually nothing about airplanes, TV, the internet, smart phones, or the Hot Pocket patented microwaveable crisping sleeve have invalidated his summary of capitalism.

      • KobaCumTribute [she/her]English
        17•16 days ago

        “Marx could not explain why kids love [“breakfast cereal” that is literally just cookies, you’re feeding them literal fucking cookies for a meal]!”

      • invo_rt [he/him]English
        6•16 days ago

        Hot Pocket patented microwaveable crisping sleeve

        Did you know they stopped including that? Probably allowed them to shave a couple pennies off their costs. They tell you to microwave it if you don’t care that it’ll be squishy or air fry it if you want it crispy. There’s probably a critique of capital rolled in there.

    • invo_rt [he/him]English
      12•16 days ago

      I remember seeing a debate online during and post-COVID about automating service jobs with robots and AI and seeing people online doing the whole “Marx didn’t predict this!!” routine. I’m like, Marx predicted it as close to someone in the 1800s possibly could have.

      “Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the… automatic system of machinery… set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.”

      And to that end:

      Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself… As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure.

      This is literally what some Trump admin goon was saying on TV a few weeks ago. “Well the factories will have robots in them but we’ll need people to maintain the robots!”

      Marx caps that off with:

      Capitalism thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.

      • TreadOnMe [none/use name]English
        9•16 days ago

        Not only that, but they are really telling on themselves and their lack of understanding of industrial history (not that we are actually taught any of that at any point).

        Automation has been a thing since literally the 1780’s when Oliver Evans created the first completely automated flour mill. The principles of automation on smaller levels of have been understood for even longer that.

        Marx didn’t even need to predict it, it was already something that existed and therefore needed to be accounted for as a possibly technological progression for his theory. If anything, part of his theory was explaining why it wasn’t more prevalent!

        • invo_rt [he/him]English
          2•15 days ago

          Exactly. That’s why I’m constantly yelling at people newsflash-asshole that Marx isn’t doing some kind of esoteric theological analysis. Don’t mystify it! He’s logically looking at the dominant mode of production, identifying the internal contradictions, and critiquing it.

          • TreadOnMe [none/use name]English
            3•15 days ago

            He does do some level of discussion of that around the transformation of value to price. But what he is basically talking about is how the capitalist mystifies the process of that transformation, and thereby makes it appear natural, and in doing so, cuts himself a profit. In the same way, he also discusses the idea of fetishization of commodities and the commoditization of people.

            In doing so though, he is not discussing esoteric processes. These are everyday processes that occur all the time.

  • OBJECTION!English
    52•16 days ago

    I had a “leftist” lib recently who tried to argue that Lenin would have said to vote blue no matter who on the basis that he argued for participating in bourgeois democracy, after I linked him to theory he wrote about it. When I pointed out that Lenin called for such participation in a revolutionary communist party, he responded that the people weren’t ready to support that yet. When I pointed out that Lenin’s whole argument was based on the premise that the masses were not ready to support the communists and the point of participating was to promote the message, he accused me of, “Blindly following Lenin, regardless of material conditions.”

    Moralists don’t have beliefs. They’ll happily call themselves leftists and adopt whatever stance, say whatever sequence of words they think will ingratiate themselves to you and convince you to vote blue. I think it could be an fun bit to intentionally bait them into adopting bizarre stances just to see what the limits are. Like, what if I just started pretending to be super into Kantian ethics so they can all pretend to be Kantians and argue about how Kant would tell you to vote democrat?

  • Thallo [she/her, they/them]English
    49•16 days ago

    “You should go online and pretend you’ve read Kapital and it was all correct, and all the other online communists who haven’t read it will agree with you”