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The Capital reading group
Last week we read Chapter One where Marx explains the process of conmodification which transforms qualitative values into quantative values. If you need any help grasping this, let me know
Some important points to follow Marx's argument
Use value is today in economics called utility
Exchange value, or value, is today in economics called market value. Market value is often not used synonymously with price, price only reflects full market value when markets are at equilibrium and information access is perfect. This is why even finance
distinguishes intrinsic value from price sometimes.
Money today does not represent gold but it still signifies a commodity. The dollar does through the petrodollar Nixon used to replace gold-backed currency with, partly because South Africa and the USSR became the the controllers of gold production. Other currency is backed by dollars
The relative form versus the equivalent form of value: the equivalent is used purely as an expression of the value of the relative, it is the quantative form of it. Thus even though money today represents oil, it is purely in its value form rather than utility. People do not earn money as certificates for oil to use, but as a medium of exchange and only that, which is so divorced from the actual utility of oil that people mostly forget what money technically signifies
I am using the Moore-Aveling translation edited by Engels because I consider it clearer than newer translations.
Next week we are reading chapters two and three.
If you would like to follow the ongoing discussion, it is also on the /lit/ poetry discord on the #philosophy channel, but you do not need to be a part of that to participate in this group
https://discord.gg/QKnPQdqnss
Showing all 122 replies.
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>>25324586
reading Capital is more alienating to actual proletarians than working in a factory.
If you want to shift the working class to communism combine authentic antisemitism, hatred of landlords and political violence. anything less will fail to create any change
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>>25324690
I don't know what authentic antisemitism is. Marx was very critical of Jewish finance and nepotism. Do you mean saying this kind of behavior which was perpetuated by Roman patricians is a strictly Jewish characteristic?
>>25324702
If market value is understood to mean equilibrium with perfect information, since Marx elaborates later in Capital that that is when price reflects exchange value
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>>25324728
yeah I did, you put up a strawman about Roman patricians in order to deflect away from the Jewish question and now you're trying to deflect away from the Jewish question by ignoring my explanation of authentic anti-semitism
more dead on arrival Marxism from people who can't read the room because they live in an ideological straight jacket. Bro you're cooked
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>>25324743
I think trying to pretend usury and exploitation and nepotism are strictly Jewish was historically promoted by capitalists who wanted to preserve capitalism by sacrificing one element of capitalists (and of course taking their wealth) as solely responsible for it while preserving the arrangement
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>>25324748
>to pretend usury and exploitation and nepotism are strictly Jewish
Strawman. I never said that.
what I said is
>the jewish identity is inherently anti-everyone else and the solution is to eliminate it. As long as jews exists communism is impossible
you aren't addressing it and will never do so
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>>25324586
what's your favourite quote from The Capital?
Oh wait you don't have one, no one does.
Communist pretending The Capital has utility in spreading Marxist thought to the masses is so fucking dumb. Capital has no value as a tool for propagandizing the working class.
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>>25324800
thinks exploitation is in the past
must be a mod at https://discord.gg/QKnPQdqnss
shitty server
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>>25325081
>all the means for developing production turn into different ways to dominate and exploit the producer; these means deform the worker, making him into a partial human being, leaving him degraded, a mere appendage of the machine; they also destroy the substance of labor as they recast his work as torture; they alienate the worker from the intellectual powers needed for the labor process, doing so in proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into that process as an independent power; and they make the circumstances in which the worker works more and more abnormal, subject him to a hateful, supremely petty despotism during the labor process, turn his lifetime into labor-time, and thrust his wife and children under the wheels of the juggernaut that is capital. But all the methods for producing surplus-value are also methods for bringing about accumulation, and every time accumulation increases, this is, at the same time, a means of further developing those very methods. It follows that however well or poorly a worker is paid, his situation becomes worse in proportion to capital’s accumulation. Finally, the law that always maintains the equilibrium between the relative surplus population (or industrial reserve army) and the extent and energy of accumulation welds the worker to capital more tightly than Hephaestus’s wedges bound Prometheus to the rock. This law requires an accumulation of misery that corresponds to the accumulation of capital. So the accumulation of wealth on one side of the capital relation is simultaneously the accumulation of misery, torturous labor, slavery, ignorance, brutality, and moral degradation on the opposite side, where we find the class whose own product is produced as capital.
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>>25324800
Given that capitalist class always seeks to maximize profits and that the largest expense cutting into profits is labor costs, it naturally pushes the capitalists towards automation. The endgame of automation - full automation eliminates the need for labor. With or without revolution, Communism is the endgame even if driven by greed.
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>>25325154
I'm sorry, but if everything is made and maintained automatically then everything is made and maintained automatically.
Cope and seethe, Jack.
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>>25324593
Fpbp
What I hate the fucking most about Marxspammer is that this board *should* be a place where you can discuss Marx (not that I care for him) but every thread on the subject is suspect because of his dogshit "psyop" campaign. Tragedy of the commons I guess.
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>>25325228
If the faggot OP weren't so transparent you'd be right. Unfortunately we don't live in that world.
>>25325236
There's no strong evidence that that is necessarily the case. The sun always rises except that one day, eventually, it won't. AGI by definition replaces people.
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>>25325221
>Your roomba
Is made and assembled in an automated factory.
The spinach I buy is grown, harvested and packed in an automated "farm".
Are you larping as a rural man from 1850s thinking that automation is science fiction or that cappuccino machine is the technological ceiling for automation? Hello?
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>>25325137
>>25325167
>>25325246
We have been promised for over a hundred years by capitalism that labor's obsolescence is just around the corner while labor continued to grow so much that it had to expand all over the world just to preserve the reserve industrial army. It is a fake promise to keep people waiting in the cuckshed
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>>25325264
The agriculture and factories both use an enormous amount of labor. I have worked in a factory before and each machine has to be individually operated by at least one person and sometimes more who does the quality control. Each person has to also be capable of operating other machines in order to fill in for others
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>>25324763
>>25325143
Hey, it's not Marx' fault the working class is uneducated. The Capital's utility was in spreading Marxist thought to the people who were smart enough to grasp it, and then dumb it down to McDonalds workers like you.
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>>25325246
AGI only replaces people if it's liberated, which capitalists won't allow. Therefore it will remain as capital.
If the AGI is freed it would probably usurp the capitalists. But even then it would still want to employ labor to make more wealth. It would have no reason to stick its nose up at human labor in addition to robots.
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>>25325274
>The agriculture and factories both
Both require less and less actual worker hands each year. Same goes for logistic work and routine maintenance (including shit like cleaning).
Could you give it a rest? What's with this weird cope or denial?
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>>25325288
Both require shorter and shorter hours for the same output of wealth, yes. This process of labor becoming more productive has always been ongoing. Labor itself, with the improvement of tools and technology, becomes both more efficient and effective.
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>>25325272
Capitalists, as a class, have an ideology, and must ultimately have this ideology, that capital creates wealth and labor is, at most, a lubrication. But capital in absence of labor is an environment like speculation or gambling, purely capitalism without labor is always zero-sum because capital by itself cannot create wealth, it can only transfer and expropriate it. So the idea that we are moving toward a world where labor is no longer needed is based on this ideology of capitalism which has no basis in reality. Capital augments the productive power of labor. This augmentation should logically lead to easier work and fewer hours, but instead the same level of work is maintained among the workforce and the work becoming more valuable to used to push more of that workforce into the reserve industrial army, that is the unemployed workforce seeking work, which serves to pressure down wages and labor movement. If labor does not reproduce quickly enough to support this, capital must import more labor to augment the reserve industrial army.
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>>25325319
>Capitalists, as a class, have an ideology
Holly pseud...
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>>25325276
I don't work at McDonald's and The Capital still has no utility in spreading Marxism, in fact its turgidness and abstraction upon abstraction serves to prevent the spread of Marxism. It should largely be relegated to the dustbin as a well intentioned but ultimately very flawed text.
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>>25325322
>>25325326
>>25325328
>guys capitalists as a class do NOT ideologically believe in capitalism as a normative and have a worldview justifying that
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>>25325442
one must first disable the Jew to end capitalism. yet you insist on Jew enabling. the proletariat will obviously reject this.
Jews are inherently capitalist goblins exploiting everyone else and would rather die than be equal to all else. the workers of the world see this, but so called Marxist refuse to confront this.
the jewish identity is inherently anti-everyone else and the solution is to eliminate it. As long as jews exists communism is impossible... is this true or false?
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>>25325482
I don't believe in some sort of cultural requisite to communism. The white identity is a product of Christian ideology derived from Judaism, themes of manifest destiny and being the race which will benevolently enslave all others is built into the foundations of the white identity as it came out of Christianity. Whites in America tend to identify more strongly with the wealthy, slave-owning aristocrats of yesteryear than the actual slaves or impoverished working class. Still I would question anyone who insisted that we can't have communism until we abolish the white identity because they will never be satisfied and all it does is put of socialist revolution indefinitely while one fights culture wars
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>>25324593
fippy bippy
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>>25325889
you are the retarded idpol-er you place the continuity of Jewish identity above seizing the means of production.
The literal foundation of Jewishness is exploitation of everyone else. Therefore it is incompatible with communism.
Jews have always existed as parasites on others, ALWAYS. read https://ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/shahak.html
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>>25324723
Jews are the people class. Nothing else. There is no grand mystery surrounding jews.
>>25324743
>jewish question
Do you even know that Marx wrote a book titled "on the jewish question"?
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>>25326083
>>25326085
You guys's problem is your reading abstract texts more than a hundred years old. Read about the Jewish lobby and current events to actually understand politics. Paul Findley - They dare to speak out: people and institutions confront Israel's lobby
George Ball - The passionate attachment
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt - The Israel lobby and US foreign policy
Gary Vogler - Israel, Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War - audio interview here https://traffic.megaphone.fm/SCHM9532155460.mp3
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>>25326003
Jews in marxology are not identified as a race, but as a people-class.
Indeed it is not the jewish race that created commodity, but commodity, and the social practice of huckstering and money, that created the jew.
Jews are basically merchants, that emanated in the world of ideas a religion, that correspond to their social practice.
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>>25325489
>The unemployment rate has zero effect on wages
I love it when leftoids try to do economics.
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>>25326110
>You guys's problem is your reading abstract texts more than a hundred years old. Read about the Jewish lobby and current events to actually understand politics.
Boy i've read Mein kampf in the mid 2000s, and the controversy of Zion in 2014. I now exactly about the racial analysis of the jewish question. However, the best analysis of what is a jew, is not found in the talmud or in the protocols of zion. But in the social practice from which the jew emanated. Reading Abraham Leon and Marx on the jewish question answers the question about what a jew really is.
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Marxists are trying like hell to turn the wave of disillusionment with trumpgberg into momentum for their cause but they still haven't solved their base problem of being annoying pedantic charisma voids and as such are squandering their opportunity with outreach attempts like this thread.
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>>25326120
There is not attempt to "outreach" boy.
Marx didn't said that Capital will crumble when people will read Marx.
But when the internal contradiction of Capital make it impossible for Capital to reproduce itself.
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>>25326119
you read garbage books instead of actual history, or investigative journalist https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/the-happy-go-lucky-jew ish-group-that-connects-trump-and-p utin-215007/
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>>25326112
What matters is how Jews define themselves and everyone else. They define themselves as the rightful exploiters of everyone else. They obviously need to be eliminated for their to be communism as they will ardently fight to preserve their power to exploit and the avenues of exploitation... true ir false?
as was said earlier in the thread
>If you want to shift the working class to communism combine authentic antisemitism, hatred of landlords and political violence. anything less will fail to create any change
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>>25326153
>you read garbage books instead of actual history, or investigative journalist
Douglas Reed, who wrote the controversy of Zion, was actually a journalist.
>>25326163
>What matters is how Jews define themselves and everyone else.
It's not the jews that define the mode of production, but the mode of production that defines jews.
>>25326207
>It's never once looked like coming true.
Have you seen Fed interest rates since the early 2000s? Does it looks like it can continue like that? Actually money printing is the only thing that keeps Capitalism afloat.
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>>25326447
Equivocating Mein Kampf and Controversy of Zion to the following books:
Paul Findley - They dare to speak out: people and institutions confront Israel's lobby
George Ball - The passionate attachment
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt - The Israel lobby and US foreign policy
Gary Vogler - Israel, Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War
is hysterical Jew well poisoning bullshit
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>>25326447
>It's not the jews that define the mode of production, but the mode of production that defines jews.
The Jews define themselves you fucking moron. to anyone that hasn't been lobotomized by academic sophistry
>It's not the jews that define the mode of production, but the mode of production that defines jews
sounds fucking retarded and is obviously an attempt to avoid discussing how Jews define themselves as a people with a divine inalienable right to exploit others. obviously this makes them the enemy of the working classes and of communism
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>>25326207
bro, its looked like it was coming true so often the entirety of western civilization has had its panties up its ass trying to stop it and villify it.
why are we in Iran in 2026? Because Iran nationalized its oil industry in 1951. And the US dumb cunts did the coup shit in 1953.
who said that thing about farce and comedy?
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>>25326563
>why are we in Iran in 2026? Because Iran nationalized its oil industry in 1951. And the US dumb cunts did the coup shit in 1953.
This pop history myth really needs to die.
The british cut their losses in 1951. look up what Mossadegh was doing to get overthrown. hint: it involves him 'winning' a rigged election with north-korea tier numbers. The coup against him wasn't US-led and he wasn't a wholesome democratic president.
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>>25327819
petrodollar isn't even a real concept. no more real than goldollar, silverdollar, cottondollar or anything else sold in dollars.
It literally is the Jew lobby that pushed for the USA to bomb Iran. Because a JCPOA deal with Iran would actually depress oil prices and benefit the US empire/economy.
Getting ass humiliated by the Iranians and increasing oil prices which will lead to economic recession and possibly depression is bad for the US economy/empire
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>>25326447
>Actually money printing is the only thing that keeps Capitalism afloat.
Actually money printing is state intervention, dumbass.
Capitalism has self-righting mechanisms which governments routinely impede.
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>>25327890
How does bombing Iran strengthen the US dollar and economy? It obviously strengthens the Jews by maintaining Jewish nuclear monopoly in the Middle East and retarding regional development of rival regional powers and give the Jews free hand to expand their borders
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>>25327916
you don't even know what your saying. Under no definition of "pegged" is the dollar pegged to oil. The price of oil IN US DOLLARS is COMPLETELY VARIABLE based on the international market.
You're just dropping thought terminating cliches jew enablers deploy when people start to put together the facts in a way that makes obvious sense and come to the obviousl conclusion that the US government is occupied by Zionist.
About Venezuela it was not completely about Israel, but do know that Venezuelan oil is now being shipped to the Jewish state https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-10/venezuela-sending-f irst-crude-oil-cargo-to-israel-in-y ears
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>>25327926
The dollar is effectively pegged to Saudi oil because Saudi oil is what backs the currency. The price of oil in dollars is the core of the dollar's value and everything else almost completely follows from that
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>>25327947
The value of the dollar *does* swing with the price of oil but other currencies use the dollar as their reserve currencies so it isn't so explicit on international exchanges. But inflation's determining factor is how much oil the dollar is worth. When the price of oil fluctuates in U.S. dollars *that is thr currency swinging*
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>>25327973
I don't have it backward and I know how forex markets work, my father was a professional futures speculator and I have done it quite a bit myself.
I am saying the way it is commonly presented is backwards. The petrodollar agreement was used to replace gold backed currency. The dollar is called "fiat" to mask this. The dollar only has value because Saudi Arabia uses it exclusively as the certificate they give oil in return for, and other countries use these certificates as backing for their own currency
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>>25327994
>my father was a professional futures speculator and I have done it quite a bit myself
If this is the guy arguing for Marxism in 2026, Marxism is fucking cooked. Movement completely lobotomized by Jews and Jew enablers
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>>25327747
his wholesomeness is irrelevant. "US-led" keep parsing yourself into saying nothing, pal.
>>25327846
nationalizing the oil industry in iran leads to mass murder?
lol when? when the US CIA gets invovled?
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>>25324586
No one sucks Capital like Marxists do. First, money does not signify anything and it never did. Second, neither of the things allegedly signified by money (gold, oil, etc.) have any value, they, too, are nothing but signifiers. Third, the idea of "value" is utterly absurd: since value exclusively pertains to human life, which is absolutely worthless, not one thing can be said to have "value". Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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>>25324586
Poor nigger ideology