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A lot of people love to criticize Marx without actually having read him. You and this sub-stacker included. Where does Marx ever support wokeness in his writings? Capital was a critique of capitalism and the social systems that it encourages that is largely correct. I have yet to hear an actually convincing critique of commodity fetishism or the labour theory of value that isn't a nitpick. Western leftists don't actually want to read Marx (because he is hard), nor do they seriously want to implement his ideas (also hard, and never successfully done, you can complain all you want about me pulling out the "not real communism" card, but the Soviet Union and China very clearly still engaged in capitalistic commodity production, which Marx would have criticized).
Nah it's completely false. In fact, it is the failure of Marxian approach that gave birth to wokeness, in a sense. According to Marx, capitalism, with time, was supposed to lead to worsening conditions of the proletariat and making workers extremely poor, so that the capitalists would own all the means of production and the workers would literally work there only because the alternative it dying from hunger, and only paid as much as to allow them to barely not die from hunger. Which eventually would cause the desperate masses to revolt. That part kinda makes sense, if I were in such situation I'd probably revolt too. Except that it's totally not what happened in the developed capitalist countries. In fact, even in the countries where the revolt did happen - like Russia - not only it could not happen by Marxian theory (Russia was way to underdeveloped to progress to that point, it barely crawled out of feudalism by then, and there was a lot of confusion among Russian Marxist theoreticians about what the heck Lenin is thinking when Marx clearly says Russia is not ready) but it was largely perpetrated by the intelligentsia, with the proletariat taken along for the ride and used as a figurehead. And it went worse from there, because the masses of the workers under capitalism liked their 401k and ESPP much more than preparing the glorious socialist revolution. And if you look closely at who we see as self-described Marxians today, you'll see a distinct scarcity of factory workers and large prevalence of college professors and their brainwashed students.
And that was the reason why the Left needed something different from the classical Marxism. Because building a movement based on wage workers eager to overthrow capitalism was not viable anymore. That's why Gramsci invented cultural Marxism, which eventually performed a hostile takeover of civil rights movement and ecological movements, and evolved into wokeness. This all was because Marx's theory completely failed to predict the actual events.
I don't know much about China, but I will get into a debate about Soviet Union, because I know quite a bit about it. And in Soviet Union, they actually tried to implement Marxian economical planning as much as they could, completely honestly, and involved such mathematical powerhouses as Kantorovich, and after they got over the idiotic rejection of cybernetics, also all the computation resources they could muster. Only after it became absolutely clear to them there's no possible way they can make it work they started to let some capitalist elements in, such as khozraschyot, cooperatives, economic incentivization, federalization of economic planning, etc. They tried Marx as hardcode as they could afford without causing famine.... oh wait, scratch that, including causing famines that cost millions of lives - and still could not make it work. Nobody can.
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90 percent of the people on the Motte got their entire knowledge of communism from one PragerU video they watched 10 years ago.
That's a rather confident assertion that reads mostly as a very broad generalization/insult.
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I don't think this is anywhere close to true.
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Is this a joke? Please help me out here.
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Its not that Marx neccesarily supported Wokeism so much as the Woke copied the Marxists' homework and flipped few of the words around in the hopes the teacher wouldn't notice. The identitarian left literally used to describe thier ideology as "Cultural Marxism" back in the 90s.
The analogy I would use is that they dug out the rotting corpse of communism from the graveyard cut of the head (caring about social inequity), and limbs (e.g. working towards a revolution), replaced the head and a few limbs with what had previously been sideshows on the left, and then sent comrade Igor to the roof with a lightning rod.
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A communist factory is having its workers toil away for hours making widgets that nobody wants. The value of those widgets is zero irregardless of how much work went into making them.
That's not exactly a nitpick. How much people want something is incredibly important in determining its value.
This is a straw man of the labor theory of value. And also equally applies to capitalist speculative bubbles. This is what Marx calls commodity fetishism: the divorcing of use value from monetary value.
The trick here is claiming there's such thing as quantifiable "use value". It's actually two tricks. The first one that there's some objective fixed value that an object has, regardless of anybody's opinions, and it can be calculated, even if it required omniscient entity having total view of the economy. The second trick is that a specific person or organization (Gosplan if you will) can calculate it. Both are wrong. This is actually one of the fundamental reasons why socialism fails - it can not produce proper prices, and without proper prices, economic cooperation can not function, as prices drive resource allocation. The Soviets tried to implement non-price resource allocation and failed miserably. You can just "assign" prices but as they would be disconnected from actual economic value, you will either get massive deficits, or a ton of resources wasted on producing useless widgets. In a socialist economy, you usually have plenty of both.
Sure, bubbles are a consequence of resource misallocation. But you know what is also true of bubbles? None of them can last for long. Exactly because this is a self-defeating process - the longer the price remains misaligned, the higher is the pressure to correct. Until the bubble bursts. On the contrary, the misallocation that is driven by directive prices and resource assignment can last indefinitely, it does not have the feedback mechanism.
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Is there a way to quantify "use value"? If not, this seems to be a rhetorical trick. Why would I care about a notion of value that exists simply to win arguments about communism?
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Whether or not they will be exchanged for money or handed out for free, nobody wants those widgets. They are useless crap. They are worthless.
That would mean the corresponding labor was not "socially necessary" labor time. Marx was trying to avoid getting down into supply & demand fluctuations, to mainly make a more core scientific approach to investigating where value/profit comes from. But that "socially necessary" term is where he had to bundle it in anyway.
Hm then where do you draw the line? What if the widgets just suck but aren't totally useless?
Yeah I think it's just backward-looking in his conception. To the extent it was profitable at all, then that's the extent that the labor turned out to have been 'socially necessary'. So it's supply & demand after all.
I think it basically works as a way to think of where the profit value comes from: putting together inputs and selling the output for more money, thus you got more 'use-value' out of the inputs than you paid for their 'exchange-value'. But I agree with others that there's no reason for Marx to have said that only labor can have a use-value greater than their fair exchange-value (apparently he just switched on a dime while writing Capital and declared that, in order to make the theory of value into a classical labor theory of value, and then got tied in knots trying to justify that declaration).
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That just shows that the marxian concept of "use value" isn't fully capturing what people find...useful...about the things they buy, because money is entirely fungible into other "useful" items, and insofar as people are willing to spend it on one thing, they're revealing their utility function about both that thing and the other things they could have bought but aren't.
Money is entirely fungible -- that is, one unit of currency is the same as another unit of the same currency -- but it is not entirely convertible into other useful items (although it's pretty good at this). The divorcing of use value from exchange value doesn't make sense for commodities or bulk manufactured goods, but it does for other things -- real estate in particular.
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This again assumes humans are rational actors, and fails to adequately capture the reasons for an economic booms and busts in a capitalist system and the kind of behavior you see from the ultra-rich.
...No? That's literally the opposite of what I said. "Use value" assumes some objective, rational value of "use"; exchange value includes all the irrational feelings and opinions people can have about goods and services like risk aversion, FOMO, status, or just idiosyncratic preference. People also make secondary bets on what other people will find useful/interesting/worth buying, introducing further fuzziness into the system.
That's not commodity fetishism; it's the opposite. Recognizing that when people are buying things, they're not just buying things - they're communicating with other people as well.
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More to the point, sometimes you can't even determine how much people will 'want' something until you take the risk of producing it and trying to sell it.
And sometimes you guess wrong, or you underestimate the ultimate demand and have to adjust.
That risk doesn't go away, its just a matter of who absorbs the risk of getting it wrong (or gets rewarded for getting it right!), and the existence of such a risk makes for one hell of an incentive to get it right.
Vs. the Soviet Commissary who is only punished if the widget factory doesn't produce enough widgets in a given month, even if those widgets are just being thrown out. So he'll happily keep the widgets flowing as long as he can.
That's not unique to communism, though: it's just the principal agent problem. Capitalist corporations regularly make decisions that are wildly insane due to non-economic factors and burn a lot of value in the process, and the decision maker can still walk away with their bag.
It's true that there is more of a signal to discourage this in capitalist economies, but that is a very coarse signal. And once a corporation becomes successful enough, it rapidly realizes that the best way to maintain its position is to do its best to eliminate the risks of being subject to that signal.
Well you're just getting at the point that skin in the game is the best way to align incentives.
If your company offers paying customers a ride to the Titanic on an experimental submersible, having your CEO along for each ride is a good way to align incentives.
And on that point, someone had to realize "hey, there might be a market for tours of the titanic wreck site," and actually spend money and develop a product that can deliver on that desire, while being uncertain if they'd find enough customers.
And if it fails, well that CEO is now removed from his position of influence.
I agree that there's been a drift where decision makers in a corporate environments are insulated from the consequences of their decisions (although I argue this is mostly due to political influence. Criminal prosecutions are underused).
I also agree with the point that dominant actors in a market will usually start attempting to reduce the influence of competition, to build their 'moat' so they can start to exploit their position rather than improve their practices.
I would not agree that they're successful in the majority of cases.
I'm just pointing out that in practice Communism is unadulterated diffusion of responsibility for any mistakes, and Capitalism at least HAS a signal, and there are ways to make the signal sharper.
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If Marxism does not work in practice, it doesn't matter how elegantly his theory is postulated: no more than we don't have to read Mein Kampf to present a convincing rebuttal of Nazism.
As for commodity fetishism and LTV, why do people want to buy Belle Delphine's gamer girl bathwater? Subjective theory of value (STV) is that it is not labor or the raw materials that determine the price of the good, but the people buying and selling. Can Marx explain the used panties market? The collectable card market? Not without extensive academic arm-twisting or moralistic dismissal.
Ah, but you don't understand. Nobody has yet tried True Marxism! /s
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Breathlessly awaiting someone to upload "The Marxist Explanation of the Labubu Phenomenon" to Youtube.
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If you were waiting for the right moment to add a flair, this is your moment.
Noted.
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The labour theory of value makes economically inaccurate predictions and was falsified as such before Capital was even published (Smith himself, who invented it, admitted it cannot account for short-term fluctuations in prices and offered alternatives). You can say a lot of good about Marx's sociological analysis, you can say no good about the LTV. It's just wrong. The only way you can say it's not wrong is by turning it into a moral dogma.
To quote Rothbard:
If we're to call this a nitpick, we're to call all of science a nitpick for discarding theories that make empirically false predictions.
The reason for the NEP is that Lenin tried Marxian economics and it so massively failed that they had to pragmatically adopt bourgeois economics.
The reason for Dengism is a similar pragmatic concession to the massive toll of Maoism.
Marxian ideas have been implemented, they simply did not produce the expected results. Collective farms do not output more food than centrally planned or privately owned alternatives all else being equal.
But both Maoism and the initial Soviet attempts to produce goods were commodity fetishism. Especially in Maoism there was this obsession with quantities of goods produced rather than with satisfying individual's use values. Even after NEP and in Dengism there were/are heavy amounts of commodity fetishism: focusing on raw quantities of goods produced rather than thinking about what the population actually needs
People love to dismiss the soviet system, and undoubtedly there were serious problems, but in some ways it was very impressive. The soviets took a country that was ravaged by civil war and by the after effects of WW1 that had never been fully industrialized and within 20 years managed to largely self-sufficiently outproduce the Nazis and win the Second World War. Yes lend-lease helped, but Soviet home industry did most of the heavy lifting.
After the war, it looked like things like linear algebra might help better calculate production quotas, but a combination of corruption, lack of compute power, and excessive focus on military spending made it impossible for the soviet standard of living to keep up with the West.
Can you explain the Rothbard quote a bit more? I feel like the easy explanation for that from within the LTV is that the labor equivalence ratios between different goods aren't calculated correctly. Although that kind of argument can quickly get into dogma territory, so maybe you're right.
You'll find no such love from me. I have a surprising amount of sympathy for economic socialism as an engineer. But that's only translated to a deeper understanding of its failings.
Market socialists love to say this, but it's wrong. No amount of increase in compute power can solve the Economic Calculation Problem, because it's not inherently about compute power but about how computers can't read minds. And indeed MarSocs have been unable to produce models even today that would solve the problem, despite increases in compute power that give a single man today more than all that was available to nations then. Orthodox Marxists meanwhile well and truly gave up on even trying.
Intensification-90 could not work for the same reasons paper based Gosplan couldn't. Economic exchange requires informational inputs that planners cannot produce outside of very specific circumstances (like war), because the fundamental assumption that economic value is distinct from individual desire, and can thus be computed ahead of time, is wrong.
That's often advanced, yes, but nobody ever actually produces a "correct" formula for the ratios that actually makes any empirical predictions.
One of Marx's most famous conclusions out of the LTV is that since value is created by labour, profit rates must be lower in capital-intensive industries and higher in labor-intensive industries.
However, it has been observed by Smith and Ricardo (and since) that profit rates tend to equalize across all industries. How is this possible if the profit rates are always higher in some industries?
In posthumously published Volume 3 of Capital, Marx purported to solve this problem.
Instead of actually providing some relationship between the rates of profit, Marx punts and uses prices of production and capital mobility to explain it, thus reinventing an ad-hoc marginalism to solve this particular problem.
Either the labor theory of value explains prices (but then the transformation problem is unsolved) or competition explains prices (but then why do we need the labor theory?).
The economic calculation problem is worse than even that. It's not just that a planner cannot properly figure out how much of each good to produce without price information (though I have had communist-sympathetic individuals unironically tell me that the solution might just be to conduct a whole lot of opinion polling, I am not kidding), it's also that a planner cannot estimate the most efficient method of production for any given good since there is no meaningful measure of profit under a centrally planned economy. As Mises puts it:
"The director wants to build a house. Now there are many methods that can be resorted to. Each of them offers, from the point of view of the director, certain advantages and disadvantages with regard to the utilization of future building, and results in a different duration of the building’s serviceableness; each of them requires other expenditures of building materials and labor and absorbs other periods of production. Which method should the director choose? He cannot reduce to a common denominator the items of various materials and various kinds of labor to be expended. Therefore he cannot compare them. He cannot attack either to the waiting time (period of production) or to the duration of serviceableness, a definite numerical expression. In short, he cannot, in comparing costs to be expended and gains to be earned, resort to any arithmetical operation. The plans of his architects enumerate a vast multiplicity of various items in kind: they refer to the physical and chemical qualities of various items in kind; they refer to the physical productivity of various machines, tools, and procedures. But all their statements remain unrelated to each other. There is no means of establishing any connection between them."
This is damning, since even if the mind of a planner were miraculously endowed with complete and accurate knowledge of the quantities and qualities of the available factors of production, of the latest techniques for combining and transforming these factors into consumer goods, and of the set of all individuals’ value rankings of consumer goods, the economic calculation problem still exists. Without market prices that could be used to determine the profitability of a project, one would still be unable to determine if a given plan for production of goods was optimal, and in fact would never be able to assess that even if the plan was horrifically and destructively uneconomic.
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That's dramatically underselling lend-lease. The US provided approximately 2/3 of the USSR's trucks, 60% of their aviation fuel, 10% of their planes, etc. And the US was also able to give all this to the Soviets while they also built the most powerful navy in human history and waged a war across North Africa, Europe, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia.
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I'd say American industry did most of the heavy lifting. The levels of American production were simply insane.
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