• OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
          21·
          10 months ago

          Reading an actual book on economics makes it impossible for a benevolent individual to be a communist, at least without a physically painful amount of cognitive dissonance.

          Oh, you sound really informed on this. What books of marxist economics have you read to come to this conclusion? What theory of subjective value based economics books?

          I mean, I’ve just spent over a decade studying various schools of economics, maybe you have much more insight than me on this topic.

            • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
              21·
              10 months ago

              You’re literally a self described libertarian lmao

              Anyway, stop dodging the question. What economic writings have you read from Marx that you’re basing your opinion of Marxist economics on? What problems did you have with them?

                • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
                  11·
                  10 months ago

                  Yes, well, some people are braver than others, and are thus able to declare what they believe in. What do you believe in?

                  Literally a communist, something that could actually get me targeted by the state instead of being a “no step on snek” cosplayer.

                  I don’t know why you would bring Marx into this. He was a philosophist, not an economist or a politician

                  His magnum opus is literally an economic analysis of how capitalism functions lmao

                  Historical materialism & class struggle for instance. He describes the change from feodalism to capitalism as it happened but then goes deep into conjecture land in fantasizing the future change to socialism and communism. When this was violently experimented with in 1900s, it didn’t go at all as he described. The class struggle is not inevitable at all, and only happens with a combination of bad leadership and agitation (check lemmygrad.ml for practical modern examples of latter). His idea of classless society was basically speculative science fiction, and still is.

                  Okay, so you haven’t read his work and you buy into the idea that “all socialist projects have failed” despite all their successes, and the continued survival of many projects.

                  I disagree with many points of his critique of capitalism. For instance, the value of a product or service is not derived from the labor put to it, but the value of the product or service to whoever is buying it. Thus surplus is a valid concept.

                  So you favor a more shallow understanding of where value emerges from, and you haven’t read what Marx has actually said about subjective value. What makes the product valuable to whoever is buying jt? Subjective value wants you to believe it is just arbitrary.

                  I disagree that wealth concentration is a fundamental problem. In the grand scale, more individual wealth leads to more individual happiness, so the important thing is that everyone’s wealth increases. If my neighbor gets 100x richer in real wealth in the time I get 2x richer, I will still be 2x richer. It only becomes a problem if those figures are 100x and 1x or worse, or if he uses his 100x wealth to buy an army to take my stuff, and my claim is that this is not happening in most of the capitalist world.

                  Okay, so have you read anything about surplus labor value theory? Anything about alienation under capitalism?

                  Also the notion that were all getting richer at different rates needs evidence.