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> Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greates

• adrianN 3y ago
  Was Marx wrong?
  • robertlagrant 3y ago
    Probably. Or at least that turned out to not matter so much. The alternative, keeping both control of resources and direct power in the state, seems to keep causing millions of deaths. Separating them into markets for resources and power for a more limited state seems to work much better. This idea also ignores innovation. New rich people come along and some rich people get poor. That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power.
    • danans 3y ago
      > New rich people come along and some rich people get poor. Absent massive redistribution that is usually a result of major political change (i.e. the New Deal), rich people tend to stay rich during their lifetimes and frequently their families remain so for generations after. > That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power. Due to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth for day to day existence, it's only value to an extremely wealthy person after endowing their heirs is power.
      • robertlagrant 3y ago
        > Absent massive redistribution that is usually a result of major political change (i.e. the New Deal), rich people tend to stay rich during their lifetimes and frequently their families remain so for generations after. The rule of thumb is it lasts up to three generations, and only for very very few people. They are also, for everything they buy, and everyone they employ, paying tax. Redistribution isn't the goal; having funded services with extra to help people who can't is the goal. It's not a moral crusade. > Due to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth for day to day existence, it's only value to an extremely wealthy person after endowing their heirs is power. I think this is a non sequitur.
        • depr 3y ago
          What is your rule of thumb based on? In, for example, the Netherlands the richest people pay less tax [0]. Do you think this is not the case in many other countries? > They are also, for [..] they employ, paying tax Is that a benefit of having rich people? If companies were employee-owned that tax would still be paid. [0]: https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-expat-news/wealthiest-people-netherlands-arent-ones-paying-most-tax https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-expat-news/wealthie...
          • robertlagrant 3y ago
            > What is your rule of thumb based on? E.g. [0] > In, for example, the Netherlands the richest people pay less tax [0]. Do you think this is not the case in many other countries? That's a non sequitur from the previous point. However, on the "who pays taxes?" point, that article is careful to only talk about income tax in absolute terms, and indirect taxes in relative terms. It doesn't appear to be trying to make an objective analysis. > Is that a benefit of having rich people? I don't share the assumption that people should only exist if they're a benefit. > If companies were employee-owned that tax would still be paid. Some companies are employee-owned, but you have to think how that works for every type of business. Assuming that it's easy to make a business, and the hard bit is the ownership structure is a mistake. [0] https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2016/08/01/why-so-many-wealthy-families-lose-it-all-in-3-generations-and-how-to-stop-it https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2016/08/01/why-so-many-wealthy-...
    • aylmao 3y ago
      > New rich people come along and some rich people get poor This is an overly simplistic look, and disregards a lot of history where, unsurprisingly, the reason there was wealth redistribution wasn't "innovation" but government policy
      • robertlagrant 3y ago
        > This is an overly simplistic look, and disregards a lot of history where, unsurprisingly, the reason there was wealth redistribution wasn't "innovation" but government policy The point is that wealth and power aren't interchangeable. You're right that government bureaucrats have actual power, including that to take people's stuff. But you've not realised that that actual power means the rich people don't have power. There were rich people in the USSR that were killed. They had no power; the killers had the power in that situation.
        • whelp_24 3y ago
          Wealth is control of resources, which is power. The way to change power is through force that's why you need swords to remove kings and to remove stacks of gold, see assinations, war, the U.S..
          • robertlagrant 3y ago
            You need swords to remove kings because they combined power and economy. All potential tyrannies do so: monarchy, socialism, fascism, etc. That's why separating power into the state and economy into the market gets good results.
            • whelp_24 3y ago
              The separation is impossible, if you don't control the resources, you don't control the country. >separating power into the state and economy into the market gets good results. How do you think this would be done? How do you remove power from money? Money is literally the ability to convert numbers into labor, land, food,
  • osigurdson 3y ago
    If you are a Marxist, no, otherwise yes.
  • cdogl 3y ago
    > Was Marx wrong? pt. 1: Whether he was right or wrong was pertinent. You can find plenty of eminent contemporaries of Marx who claimed the opposite. My point was that this is an argument made about technological change throughout history which has become a cliché, and in my opinion it remains a cliche regardless of how eminent (in a narrow field) the person making that claim is. Part of GP was from authority, and I question whether it is even a relevant authority given the scope of the claims. > Was Marx Wrong? pt. 2: I was once a Marxist and still consider much Marxist thought and writing to be valuable, but yes: he was wrong about a great many things. He made specific predictions about the _inevitable_ development of global capital that have not played out. Over a century later, the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few has not changed, but the quality of life of the average person on the planet has increased immensely - in a world where capitalism is hegemonic. He was also wrong about the inevitably revolutionary tendencies of the working class. As it turns out, the working class in many countries tend to be either centre right or centre left, like most people, with the proportion varying over time.
    • denton-scratch 3y ago
      > He was also wrong about the inevitably revolutionary tendencies of the working class. Marx's conception of the "working class" is a thing that no longer exists; it was of a mass, industrial, urban working class, held down by an exploitative capitalist class, without the modern benefits of mass education and free/subsidized health care. The inevitability of the victory of the working class was rhetoric from the Communist Manifesto; Marx did anticipate that capitalism would adapt in the face of rising worker demands. Which it did.
      • thiagoharry 3y ago
        Not true. In Das Kapital, Marx comments that working class is not only and necessarily factory workers, even citing the example of teachers: just because they work in a knowledge factory, instead of a sausage factory, this does not change nothing. Marx also distinguished between complex and simple labor, and there is nothing in Marx writings that say that it is impossible in a capitalist society to become more complex so that we need more and more complex labor, which requires more education. Quite the opposite, in fact. It could be possible to infer with his analysis that capitalist societies were becoming more complex and such changes would happen. Moreover, you would know only if he was wrong about the victory of the working class after the end of capitalism. The bourgeoisie cannot win the class struggle, as they need the working class. So either the central contradiction in capitalism will change (the climate crisis could potentially do this), capitalism would end in some other non-anticipated way (a meteor? some disruptive technology not yet known?) or the working class would win. Until then, the class struggle will simply continue. An eternal capitalism that never ends is an impossible concept.
  • noirscape 3y ago
    For his prediction of society? Yes. Not even talking about the various tin-pot dictators paying nominal lip service to him, but Marx predicted that the working class would rise up against the bourgeoisie/upper class because of their mistreatment during the industrial revolution in well, a revolution and that would somehow create a classless society. (I'll note that Marx pretty much didn't state how to go from "revolution" to "classless society", so that's why you have so many communist dictators; that between step can be turned into a dictatorship to as long as they claim that the final bit of a classless society is a permanent WIP, which all of them did.) Now unless you want to argue we're still in the industrial revolution, it's pretty clear that Marx was inaccurate in his prediction given... that didn't happen. Social democracy instead became a more prevailing stream of thought (in no small part because few people are willing to risk their lives for a revolution) and is what led to things like reasonable minimum wages, sick days, healthcare, elderly care, and so on and so forth being made accessible to everyone. The quality of which varies greatly by the country (and you could probably consider the popularity of Marxist revolutionary thought today in a country as directly correlated to the state of workers rights in that country; people in stable situations will rarely pursue ideologies that include revolutions), but practically speaking - yeah Marx was inaccurate on the idea of a revolution across the world happening. The lens through which Marx examined history is however just that - a lens to view it through. It'll work well in some cases, less so in others. Looking at it by class is a useful way to understand it, but it won't cover things being motivated for reasons outside of class.
    • ETH_start 3y ago
      Anywhere where the working class rose up against the bourgeoisie/upper class because of their "mistreatment" (sense of victimhood instilled in them by Marxism), became dramatically worse in its civil liberties, and in its economic trajectory, in every respect. And in most places there was no such uprising, and incidentally, those places fared far better. So no, Marx was resoundingly proven wrong. Even during his own lifetime, some of his pseudoeconomic ideas/doomsaying was proven wrong. He claimed, like many demagogues and economic laymen, that automation would reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch09.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour... >>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly? and >>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together. This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
  • matkoniecz 3y ago
    > Was Marx wrong? Not sure, but attempts to treat him seriously (or pretend to do this) ended horribly wrong, with basically no benefits. Is there any good reason to care what he thought? Looking at history of Poland (before, during and after PRL) gave me no interest whatsoever to look into his writings.
    • deleted 3y ago
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  • Palpatineli 3y ago
    Yes because AGI would invalidate the entirety of das Kapital.
    • thiagoharry 3y ago
      I dont think that AGI invalidates Das Kapital. AGI is just another technology that automates human labor. It does not matter that it's about intellectual labor. Even if we had sentient machines, at first they would be slaves. So in Das Kapital therminology, they would be means of production used in industry, which would not create surplus value. Exactly like human slave labor. If things change, then either it is because they rebel or because they will be accepted as sentient beings like humans. In these sci-fi scenarios, indeed capitalism could either end or change to a thing completely different and I agree that this invalidates Das Kapital, which tries to explain capitalist society, not societies in other future economical systems. But outside sci-fi scenarios, I dont think that there's something that invalidates Marx analysis.