8 ms·

There is no value without labor. This was recognized by everyone from Karl Marx to Abraham Lincoln to Adam Smith. Smith even conceded that profit was impossibl

by jmyeet 2y ago

There is no value without labor. This was recognized by everyone from Karl Marx to Abraham Lincoln to Adam Smith. Smith even conceded that profit was impossible if workers retain their surplus value, which is exactly the point. I bring this up because that's what capitalism is: draining the surplus labor value from workers to the capital-owning class. In feudalism, the artistocracy and th emonarchy extracted that value. Jeff Bezos is the new king. Why do I mention this? Because it wasn't that long ago that this view was universally accepted. The Red Scare post-WW2 spread a lot of damaging propaganda that has led ordinary people to fight for the ultra-rich to have even more money, to their own detriment. Walmart killing all your local businesses then leaving, leaving you in a food desert with a Family Dollar store maybe. That's capitalism. Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism. Monsanto agribusiness? Capitalism. Family-owned farms? Socialism. Something like Mondragon shows that large-scale cooperatives can work. And the reason why these sorts of things aren't more prevalent is that laws are passed to make them difficult to set up or outright illegal. Many US states outlaw municipal broadband, for example. And any country in the last 70 years that even thinks about nationalizing resource extraction finds itself having a coup that nearly always has the CIA's fingerprints over it. Or we simply starve them to death under the sanitized euphemism of "economic sanctions" (eg Cuba, Iraq, Venezuela). I really want people to understand that we're not doing this for any moral reason. We're doing it at the behest of Western companies who would prefer to steal the riches of these countries. Co-operatives can go a lot further than manufacturing too. It can be a solution for housing. Housing cooperatives cut out landlords, who are rent-seeking both literally and figuratively.

cholantesh 2y ago
Most likely a message that's lost on anyone offering oblations while facing Cupertino everyday.
- dontlaugh 2y ago
  More importantly, a message lost on an audience who largely is dreaming of being one of the exploiters.
  - cholantesh 2y ago
    Yeah, but my blood sugar was pretty low when I wrote that comment so I may have been more sarcastic than necessary.
    - dontlaugh 2y ago
      Nothing wrong with sarcasm, obsession with civility is a liberal past time. I was mildly critiquing the accuracy.
shafoshaf 2y ago
I'm pretty sure your economic terms are not what the consensus of professionally trained economists would say. >>>Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism. There is definitely nothing in the definition of socialism that says everything is locally-owned. Moreover, that can be a way to end up with things like Redlining and other institutional racial issues. >>>There is no value without labor. The great thing Marx did was show that everything could be converted to a value measured by labor. But, economists afterwards showed that once you have that conversion, you can do it literally with anything. We could have a system based on the number of bumblebees required to build a house. That is a normative judgement that labor is somehow special. Now, our current implementation of Capitalism is clearly wreaking havoc on our environment. But it has brought the standard of living up across the entire world past a Malthusian cycle of more food means more people, means they eat the food, and we have starvation. The same can be said for current implementations of Communism all across the globe. Lastly, cooperatives may be a great solution for a lot of manufacturing and housing challenges. And when you get to the scale of a country, a co-op is just a government, and a capitalistic democracy feels a lot more like a co-op than a dictatorship or authoritarianism even with all its pitfalls. A populous who then really starts to demand through votes that we change to improve the blight of our fellow humans seems an even better place to live, if we can just get there.
- eightysixfour 2y ago
  >>> Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism. >> There is definitely nothing in the definition of socialism that says everything is locally-owned. Moreover, that can be a way to end up with things like Redlining and other institutional racial issues. I read the OPs post as an example of propoganda (mega corp - capitalism, small company - socialism) not reality.
  - sweeter 2y ago
    Same here. It's to display the hypocrisy of those in power who declare things in their favor as beneficial and those that are not beneficial as harmful and bad. In reality it's almost the opposite, it's bootstrap capitalism for the little guys, and "socialism" and government handouts for the ultra wealthy. (I put socialism in quotes because this term is extremely commonly misused.)
calvinmorrison 2y ago
> There is no value without labor. is this a serious statement?
- CPLX 2y ago
  Not only is it serious, it’s the central argument of all political systems since there have been political systems.
- jujube3 2y ago
  He's a Marxist and believes in Marx's labor theory of value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value As wikipedia says, "modern mainstream economics rejects the LTV" (for very good reasons). It leads to some pretty obvious absurdities if you take it seriously. For example, 10,000 people digging holes should be more "valuable" than one guy designing a microchip, because hey! The holes take more labor.
  - harwoodjp 2y ago
    Your "holes" example is a distortion (simplification and misinterpretation) of Marx's theory.
    - orthecreedence 2y ago
      And it's the same idiotic one that comes up every single time. "MUDPIES CHECKMATE!!" Nevermind Marx accounted for demand and markets when talking about cost of labor, but people love to strawman.
  - cooolbear 2y ago
    Nice try, but getting 10,000 people to dig holes (e.g. gigantic infrastructure projects) ends up costing much more than what it takes for "one guy" to "design a microchip"
    - jujube3 2y ago
RHSeeger 2y ago
> There is no value without labor. While this is generally true, it's also not the entire equation. For example, there's no gain without risk. - When I work for someone else, I am offloading some of the risk to that person/owner. When someone starts a company and hires other people... if the company goes belly up, the founder loses their investment; the workers find another job. - When I rent from someone else, I am offloading the risk of owning a property to someone else. If I get a job across the country, I don't need to sell my house at a loss to move. None of this justifies people making insane amounts of money while others are starving. But neither should the worker expect to reap all the benefit unless their also willing to take all the risk.
- sgu999 2y ago
  > the founder loses their investment So does the bank, and the state that (more often than not) subsidised said investment through diverse vehicles. If the bank goes belly up, we've seen what happens, we collectively contribute to save them... because we're collectively sharing all the risk of investment in our financialized economies. I agree that some people don't want risk and others do, but as soon as you start sharing ownership that dichotomy simply disappears.
  - bboygravity 2y ago
    Sure, but using tax-payer money to save malfunctioning banks is pretty much the opposite of capitalism.
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      Crony-capitalism is capitalism, if you don't fall for the no-true-Scotsman fallacy.
  - positr0n 2y ago
    We don't collectively contribute to save shareholders. When a bank goes under the depositors are made whole through government insurance programs. Shareholders get nothing. In 2008 I believe bailouts did go to companies to keep them afloat (and thus helped shareholders). However, TARP returned a small profit for the government, so it didn't end up being a gift of free money overall imo. (reasonable people can say that the bailouts were excessive and introduced moral hazard for sure).
aegypti 2y ago
How much labor were they putting into those 1960s California starter homes!?
crooked-v 2y ago
> In feudalism, the artistocracy and th emonarchy extracted that value. Feudalism was in some ways a bit kinder, because part of the basic arrangement was the expectation that the nobles would protect the peasantry (for pragmatic that's-where-the-food-and-supplies-come-from reasons, not ethical ones). Capitalism has no such expectations or incentives.
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
> There is no value without labor. Plausible. But there is very little value without tools. In fact, one could argue that all material progress has been in the form of better and better tools. One person with a combine beats 100 people with sickles. Those tools are necessary for almost all of the value that labor produces. So if we want those tools, in the real world we need to pay the producer of those tools. (Or make them ourselves, which is possible, but runs into division-of-labor issues.) The people who manufacture combines aren't a charity; they want to receive the value of their work too. And unless the farmer (or custom cutter) has the money to buy the combine, then there's a third party in the situation - the capitalist, the person who provides the money to buy the tools that will give the increased productivity. That person usually isn't a charity, either. They need to get some return on their money. But the place where I at least partly agree is this: The worker who knows how to use the tools is deserves at least part of the value provided by using the tool. The tool-maker deserves part of the value; the capitalist deserves part of the value; and the worker also deserves part of the value. (If you don't like the word "deserves", well, without all three parties, the value isn't produced, and none of the three are charities, so if we want the value, we need to give them part of the returns.) And currently, you can make a very solid case that the worker is getting the short end of the stick. I can't buy "the worker deserves it all". No, the worker does not. But I can agree that workers deserve more than they're getting. (In the cases where the workers either make their own tools or have the money to buy them, this argument breaks down. But in an industrialized society, that seems to be the exception, not the rule.)
- jmyeet 2y ago
  > But there is very little value without tools. Did those tools magically come into existence? Or were they made? Who made them? More workers. Where did the materials come from? More workers. The point here is that everything we as a society do is so fundamentally interconnected that thousands of people contributed to pulling gold out of a mine, for example, both directly and through the tools that were created to make it possible then why are we concentrating the proceeds of this enterprise onto the capital owner who got a lease from the government (with the threat of violence backing it) just because they wrote a check to fund the operation? > ... there's a third party in the situation Yes, more products of labor. > I can't buy "the worker deserves it all" I don't believe you intended it this way but it reads as a false dichotomy. I don't expect radical change in our economic system. I would be happy to see more cooperatives for housing and manufacturing (like Mondragon). This requires some class consciousness and collective action. So much of our modern society deifies hyper-individualism. You ever wonder why that is? It's sold as "freedom" but it's really to manipulate you because there's a massive power imbalance between your employer and you. If you withhold work, most likely that employer will be fine. If that employer withholds work, you might end up homeless. The only way to counter that power imbalance is with collective action. Modern political discourse is dominated by manufactured culture war issues. This isn't new. Post-Civil War there was fear in the South of emancipated slaves and poor white people uniting [1]. To be absolutely clear, I'm not accusing you of racism or similar. My point is to show how this is manufactured to divide workers. Even the idea of the "middle class" is intentionally divisive. Why do the interests of a white-collar (middle class) worker differ from a blue-collar (lower class) worker? Why are we making that distinction? [1]: https://bittersoutherner.com/from-the-southern-perspective/miscellany/what-you-dont-know-about-the-south https://bittersoutherner.com/from-the-southern-perspective/m...
tmnvix 2y ago
> Co-operatives can go a lot further than manufacturing too. It can be a solution for housing. An interesting example of this in an article published yesterday (a housing/renovation co-op operating in Baltimore). https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/03/waterbottle-baltimore-job-program https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/03/wat...
Aloisius 2y ago
> There is no value without labor. Yet wine is higher valued than grape juice. Value can clearly exist without labor.
- cylinder714 2y ago
  Winemaking requires far more resources, labor, skill and time than simple grape juice production.
  - Aloisius 2y ago
    Resources and time are, obviously, not labor. Turning commodity grape juice into commodity wine requires no appreciable extra labor compared to the required labor to prevent fermentation. The grape juice vs. wine is a rather classic counterexample, but it's hardly difficult to come up with any number of other examples of value absent labor.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Winemaking uses far more, but does it really have to? Does the $10,000 bottle of wine really that much more labor in it to justify that price? or are value and labor only loosely related? If I get lucky and find some diamonds on the ground, have I labored a lot for the value of those diamonds on my patch of dirt compared to your patch of dirt. There's no value with absolutely zero labor, sure, but there's clearly a difference between a carpenter making 100 chairs, and a programmer making 100 copies of a program they wrote.
  - sickofparadox 2y ago
    Grapes will naturally ferment themselves into wine over time, but grape juice essentially did not exist until the industrial revolution because we needed methods to prevent the fermentation. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape_juice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape_juice
WalterBright 2y ago
> There is no value without labor. True, but there is also no value without investment and risk. Marx's failure was ignoring the other two ingredients. Marxism is building a road with hundreds of laborers with shovels. Capitalism is one guy with a bulldozer. P.S. Cuba has no riches to steal.
- kylestlb 2y ago
  Marx wrote a gigantic book called Capital and it provides a thorough analysis of investment and risk. He wrote a great deal of words describing how investment relates to surplus value (hint: investment is simply a capitalist's way of generating surplus value - profit, which is then used to generate more surplus value, which is... you understand the systemic contradiction here, I hope). You should probably read it if you want to discuss it!
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    I enjoyed reading Toliken's fantasy LODR very much, but my attempts at reading Marx's fantasies felt like hammering a nail into my skull. The attempts at implementing Marxism all ended in misery and famine. What more would anyone need to know about it? BTW, a capitalist investing money also entails risk. How it works is the more risk, the more potential reward. Does Marx account for risk? I ask that because the Marxists I hear never mention the essential role risk plays, they usually just assume there is no risk.
    - Apocryphon 2y ago
      I haven’t read Marx, nor do I particularly care to, but this seems like an endorsement for intellectual incuriosity.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        There are so many interesting things to learn that are reality (like reading history books), why waste the precious remaining few years of my life reading books promoting nonsense? I read historical accounts about the Kennedy assassination, but don't waste my time on the conspiracy theory books. Nor do I bother with treatises on ancient aliens or UFOs. Or books on astrology, kirlian photography, ESP, flat earth, religions dogma, etc. If Marxism worked, I'd be more interested in it. But it doesn't, so why bother?
Nasrudith 2y ago
Surplus-value as a notion is frankly completely barking mad, and bred from a mix of multiple different fallacies mixed together including the labor theory of value. In what universe does water by the river cost the same as water in the middle of the Saharra desert? A plant worth the same whether it is local or highly exotic? Where buying lumber at $300 a cord to burn fair, but buying it for the same $300 a cord but operating a warehouse selling it for as so much as $301 a cord retroactively somehow robbing the lumberjack? The madhouse world of surplus-labor-value! Boy, if Lewis Carroll had a field day with imaginary numbers then he missed truly golden opportunities of exploring an utterly mental system which demands fixed globally perfect valuations to avoid exploitation!

by jmyeet 2y ago

cholantesh 2y ago

Most likely a message that's lost on anyone offering oblations while facing Cupertino everyday.

dontlaugh 2y ago
More importantly, a message lost on an audience who largely is dreaming of being one of the exploiters.
- cholantesh 2y ago
  Yeah, but my blood sugar was pretty low when I wrote that comment so I may have been more sarcastic than necessary.
  - dontlaugh 2y ago
    Nothing wrong with sarcasm, obsession with civility is a liberal past time. I was mildly critiquing the accuracy.

shafoshaf 2y ago

I'm pretty sure your economic terms are not what the consensus of professionally trained economists would say. >>>Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism. There is definitely nothing in the definition of socialism that says everything is locally-owned. Moreover, that can be a way to end up with things like Redlining and other institutional racial issues. >>>There is no value without labor. The great thing Marx did was show that everything could be converted to a value measured by labor. But, economists afterwards showed that once you have that conversion, you can do it literally with anything. We could have a system based on the number of bumblebees required to build a house. That is a normative judgement that labor is somehow special. Now, our current implementation of Capitalism is clearly wreaking havoc on our environment. But it has brought the standard of living up across the entire world past a Malthusian cycle of more food means more people, means they eat the food, and we have starvation. The same can be said for current implementations of Communism all across the globe. Lastly, cooperatives may be a great solution for a lot of manufacturing and housing challenges. And when you get to the scale of a country, a co-op is just a government, and a capitalistic democracy feels a lot more like a co-op than a dictatorship or authoritarianism even with all its pitfalls. A populous who then really starts to demand through votes that we change to improve the blight of our fellow humans seems an even better place to live, if we can just get there.

eightysixfour 2y ago
>>> Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism. >> There is definitely nothing in the definition of socialism that says everything is locally-owned. Moreover, that can be a way to end up with things like Redlining and other institutional racial issues. I read the OPs post as an example of propoganda (mega corp - capitalism, small company - socialism) not reality.
- sweeter 2y ago
  Same here. It's to display the hypocrisy of those in power who declare things in their favor as beneficial and those that are not beneficial as harmful and bad. In reality it's almost the opposite, it's bootstrap capitalism for the little guys, and "socialism" and government handouts for the ultra wealthy. (I put socialism in quotes because this term is extremely commonly misused.)

calvinmorrison 2y ago

> There is no value without labor. is this a serious statement?

CPLX 2y ago
Not only is it serious, it’s the central argument of all political systems since there have been political systems.
jujube3 2y ago
He's a Marxist and believes in Marx's labor theory of value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value As wikipedia says, "modern mainstream economics rejects the LTV" (for very good reasons). It leads to some pretty obvious absurdities if you take it seriously. For example, 10,000 people digging holes should be more "valuable" than one guy designing a microchip, because hey! The holes take more labor.
- harwoodjp 2y ago
  Your "holes" example is a distortion (simplification and misinterpretation) of Marx's theory.
  - orthecreedence 2y ago
    And it's the same idiotic one that comes up every single time. "MUDPIES CHECKMATE!!" Nevermind Marx accounted for demand and markets when talking about cost of labor, but people love to strawman.
- cooolbear 2y ago
  Nice try, but getting 10,000 people to dig holes (e.g. gigantic infrastructure projects) ends up costing much more than what it takes for "one guy" to "design a microchip"
  - jujube3 2y ago

RHSeeger 2y ago

> There is no value without labor. While this is generally true, it's also not the entire equation. For example, there's no gain without risk. - When I work for someone else, I am offloading some of the risk to that person/owner. When someone starts a company and hires other people... if the company goes belly up, the founder loses their investment; the workers find another job. - When I rent from someone else, I am offloading the risk of owning a property to someone else. If I get a job across the country, I don't need to sell my house at a loss to move. None of this justifies people making insane amounts of money while others are starving. But neither should the worker expect to reap all the benefit unless their also willing to take all the risk.

sgu999 2y ago
> the founder loses their investment So does the bank, and the state that (more often than not) subsidised said investment through diverse vehicles. If the bank goes belly up, we've seen what happens, we collectively contribute to save them... because we're collectively sharing all the risk of investment in our financialized economies. I agree that some people don't want risk and others do, but as soon as you start sharing ownership that dichotomy simply disappears.
- bboygravity 2y ago
  Sure, but using tax-payer money to save malfunctioning banks is pretty much the opposite of capitalism.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    Crony-capitalism is capitalism, if you don't fall for the no-true-Scotsman fallacy.
- positr0n 2y ago
  We don't collectively contribute to save shareholders. When a bank goes under the depositors are made whole through government insurance programs. Shareholders get nothing. In 2008 I believe bailouts did go to companies to keep them afloat (and thus helped shareholders). However, TARP returned a small profit for the government, so it didn't end up being a gift of free money overall imo. (reasonable people can say that the bailouts were excessive and introduced moral hazard for sure).

aegypti 2y ago

How much labor were they putting into those 1960s California starter homes!?

crooked-v 2y ago

> In feudalism, the artistocracy and th emonarchy extracted that value. Feudalism was in some ways a bit kinder, because part of the basic arrangement was the expectation that the nobles would protect the peasantry (for pragmatic that's-where-the-food-and-supplies-come-from reasons, not ethical ones). Capitalism has no such expectations or incentives.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

> There is no value without labor. Plausible. But there is very little value without tools. In fact, one could argue that all material progress has been in the form of better and better tools. One person with a combine beats 100 people with sickles. Those tools are necessary for almost all of the value that labor produces. So if we want those tools, in the real world we need to pay the producer of those tools. (Or make them ourselves, which is possible, but runs into division-of-labor issues.) The people who manufacture combines aren't a charity; they want to receive the value of their work too. And unless the farmer (or custom cutter) has the money to buy the combine, then there's a third party in the situation - the capitalist, the person who provides the money to buy the tools that will give the increased productivity. That person usually isn't a charity, either. They need to get some return on their money. But the place where I at least partly agree is this: The worker who knows how to use the tools is deserves at least part of the value provided by using the tool. The tool-maker deserves part of the value; the capitalist deserves part of the value; and the worker also deserves part of the value. (If you don't like the word "deserves", well, without all three parties, the value isn't produced, and none of the three are charities, so if we want the value, we need to give them part of the returns.) And currently, you can make a very solid case that the worker is getting the short end of the stick. I can't buy "the worker deserves it all". No, the worker does not. But I can agree that workers deserve more than they're getting. (In the cases where the workers either make their own tools or have the money to buy them, this argument breaks down. But in an industrialized society, that seems to be the exception, not the rule.)

jmyeet 2y ago
> But there is very little value without tools. Did those tools magically come into existence? Or were they made? Who made them? More workers. Where did the materials come from? More workers. The point here is that everything we as a society do is so fundamentally interconnected that thousands of people contributed to pulling gold out of a mine, for example, both directly and through the tools that were created to make it possible then why are we concentrating the proceeds of this enterprise onto the capital owner who got a lease from the government (with the threat of violence backing it) just because they wrote a check to fund the operation? > ... there's a third party in the situation Yes, more products of labor. > I can't buy "the worker deserves it all" I don't believe you intended it this way but it reads as a false dichotomy. I don't expect radical change in our economic system. I would be happy to see more cooperatives for housing and manufacturing (like Mondragon). This requires some class consciousness and collective action. So much of our modern society deifies hyper-individualism. You ever wonder why that is? It's sold as "freedom" but it's really to manipulate you because there's a massive power imbalance between your employer and you. If you withhold work, most likely that employer will be fine. If that employer withholds work, you might end up homeless. The only way to counter that power imbalance is with collective action. Modern political discourse is dominated by manufactured culture war issues. This isn't new. Post-Civil War there was fear in the South of emancipated slaves and poor white people uniting [1]. To be absolutely clear, I'm not accusing you of racism or similar. My point is to show how this is manufactured to divide workers. Even the idea of the "middle class" is intentionally divisive. Why do the interests of a white-collar (middle class) worker differ from a blue-collar (lower class) worker? Why are we making that distinction? [1]: https://bittersoutherner.com/from-the-southern-perspective/miscellany/what-you-dont-know-about-the-south https://bittersoutherner.com/from-the-southern-perspective/m...

tmnvix 2y ago

> Co-operatives can go a lot further than manufacturing too. It can be a solution for housing. An interesting example of this in an article published yesterday (a housing/renovation co-op operating in Baltimore). https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/03/waterbottle-baltimore-job-program https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/03/wat...

Aloisius 2y ago

> There is no value without labor. Yet wine is higher valued than grape juice. Value can clearly exist without labor.

cylinder714 2y ago
Winemaking requires far more resources, labor, skill and time than simple grape juice production.
- Aloisius 2y ago
  Resources and time are, obviously, not labor. Turning commodity grape juice into commodity wine requires no appreciable extra labor compared to the required labor to prevent fermentation. The grape juice vs. wine is a rather classic counterexample, but it's hardly difficult to come up with any number of other examples of value absent labor.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Winemaking uses far more, but does it really have to? Does the $10,000 bottle of wine really that much more labor in it to justify that price? or are value and labor only loosely related? If I get lucky and find some diamonds on the ground, have I labored a lot for the value of those diamonds on my patch of dirt compared to your patch of dirt. There's no value with absolutely zero labor, sure, but there's clearly a difference between a carpenter making 100 chairs, and a programmer making 100 copies of a program they wrote.
- sickofparadox 2y ago
  Grapes will naturally ferment themselves into wine over time, but grape juice essentially did not exist until the industrial revolution because we needed methods to prevent the fermentation. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape_juice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape_juice

WalterBright 2y ago

> There is no value without labor. True, but there is also no value without investment and risk. Marx's failure was ignoring the other two ingredients. Marxism is building a road with hundreds of laborers with shovels. Capitalism is one guy with a bulldozer. P.S. Cuba has no riches to steal.

kylestlb 2y ago
Marx wrote a gigantic book called Capital and it provides a thorough analysis of investment and risk. He wrote a great deal of words describing how investment relates to surplus value (hint: investment is simply a capitalist's way of generating surplus value - profit, which is then used to generate more surplus value, which is... you understand the systemic contradiction here, I hope). You should probably read it if you want to discuss it!
- WalterBright 2y ago
  I enjoyed reading Toliken's fantasy LODR very much, but my attempts at reading Marx's fantasies felt like hammering a nail into my skull. The attempts at implementing Marxism all ended in misery and famine. What more would anyone need to know about it? BTW, a capitalist investing money also entails risk. How it works is the more risk, the more potential reward. Does Marx account for risk? I ask that because the Marxists I hear never mention the essential role risk plays, they usually just assume there is no risk.
  - Apocryphon 2y ago
    I haven’t read Marx, nor do I particularly care to, but this seems like an endorsement for intellectual incuriosity.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      There are so many interesting things to learn that are reality (like reading history books), why waste the precious remaining few years of my life reading books promoting nonsense? I read historical accounts about the Kennedy assassination, but don't waste my time on the conspiracy theory books. Nor do I bother with treatises on ancient aliens or UFOs. Or books on astrology, kirlian photography, ESP, flat earth, religions dogma, etc. If Marxism worked, I'd be more interested in it. But it doesn't, so why bother?

Nasrudith 2y ago

Surplus-value as a notion is frankly completely barking mad, and bred from a mix of multiple different fallacies mixed together including the labor theory of value. In what universe does water by the river cost the same as water in the middle of the Saharra desert? A plant worth the same whether it is local or highly exotic? Where buying lumber at $300 a cord to burn fair, but buying it for the same $300 a cord but operating a warehouse selling it for as so much as $301 a cord retroactively somehow robbing the lumberjack? The madhouse world of surplus-labor-value! Boy, if Lewis Carroll had a field day with imaginary numbers then he missed truly golden opportunities of exploring an utterly mental system which demands fixed globally perfect valuations to avoid exploitation!