Great content. This is helpful thank you. I’m tackling Capital and using a companion book to help me along. I will probably read this book more than once to better understand it. I’m on chapter 7 and counting....
@@LuisPerez-tx5jo David Harvey’s. He has one for volume 1 and volume 2. Volume 2 covers volume 3 as well. David Harvey also has a ton of TH-cam lectures that cover his books.
Did you actually read the whole book or listen to the audio. I’m listening to the audio idk how you had the patience to read this whole book must of took you so many days
Respect to you and anyone who can get through Das Kapital. I've got the PDF sitting on my computer - no way I'll get into it (at least not yet anyway). I understand the basic idea of Marx. And thanks again for such a great summary. I am not an expert. But I think Alienation is better to focus on than the economic exploitation based on Labour Value. And also the contradictions of supply and demand; as I think Marx was more in favour of economics where demand for products creates their supply rather than the other way around. 'Say's Law' is that supply creates demand - that people would buy products (whether they needed them or not) and then keep re-selling them using the profit motive, and the idea is that eventually through contiual exchange the right products would end up in the right hands. But I think Marx overturned this. But I am wary of two things: the materialist frame work Marx uses and also modern approaches like network theory. I'm not an expert. But I think Materialism as a philosophy can be very oppressive - as it only tells half the story. It basically eradicates LGBTQplus people - and in so doing eradicates everybodies intrinsic nature. So I think people should be careful in how they interpret Marx and be wary of his materialist lens. I've come to understand that materialism as a philosophy is different to materialism as a science. As a philosophy materialism seems concerned with 'motion' (hence I guess Marx's 'economic laws of motion' he uses) and our response to that, which we have evolved capacities for in the 'dorsal' part of our brains - executive planning (unique to humans), working memory (which are both unique to humans and 'higher' animals) and motor functions (that all animals share). As opposed to the 'ventral' part of our brain our long term emotional memories and fight/flight responses, metabolic homeostasis and also - evidence would suggest - innate properties such as gender identity and sexual orientation (at least emotionally - for example the motor sensory part in the dorsal part seems to also play a role in the body identity for trans people), and also our social conscious and dream experiences - all which seems in character to represent 'idealism'. Marx seems to be using Materialism in the same way Camus does with the boulder being pushed up a hill analogy from his Myth of Sisyphus: idealism is all the emotional stress of pushing the boulder up the hill working towards some idealistic goal, while materialism is the boulder itself that is free to role back down hill again. And so I think Marx is saying that capitalism relies upon enforcing the idealistic aspects of 'forced labour' while the materialistic aspects of labour become secondary - which fair enough, but I am not sure I would apply that analysis to everything? Quickly on modern approaches like Network Theory: I think you can see networks as fixed capital - where you can have many people in a network focused in on one individual say. An example would be fans of a celebrity - fans are more focused on the celebrity than each other. You can recreate Marx's alienation from this way of looking at things. Just put youtube (LOL) between the fans and the celebrity and hey presto you have the fixed capital. All the celebrity has to do then is get the 'fans' to work for them and you've got capitalism. Marx suggests the tedancy for the rate of profit to fall: so a solution there is to just expand the network, which is what capitalism does. Paul Erdos and Stanley Milgrim looked at network effects with 'degrees of separation'. You can combine this with Pareto laws of wealth distribution to show that the more people are connected to one individual (a celebrity) and less to each other, then the more 'wealth' that goes to the person in the focus of the network (which is basically TH-cams business model I guess). For example (I won't go into the formulas though it's pretty simple: 1 - 1/Pareto Index = 1/degrees of separation) the Pareto law of 80% of profits going to 20% of people (which works out the same as 50% of profits going to 1% of people - basically what we see in the world today) is given by a degrees of separation of about 6 or 7. I.e. if the degrees of separation was less then the amount of profit going to the relatively few would be less. So that's something to think about with how corporations approach the internet and future streams of revenue, if wages were to fall for labourers and also profit per labourer was to also fall due to market forces of competition, buy building a more profitable infrastucture was required to get more profits out of them? - i.e. 'The Matrix' LOL.
I'd encourage you to open up your PDF of Das Kapital and start reading it with the goal of completing it. Marx has been interpreted in many different ways, several being misinterpretations. The best way to distinguish the misinterpretations from the valid ones, and make proper comparisons between Marxism and other economic theories is to read the origin texts yourself.
Motion comes from the dialectical part of Marx's philosophy. Dialectics holds that everything is in motion. Everything is in a period of transition from one state to another, based on both its internal contradictions as well as external contradictions. For example, our bodies are constantly creating new cells, constantly changing. If we exercise, our muscle cells respond and grow stronger. If we're exposed to carcinogens, our cells can become cancerous. Changes in quantity yield a change in quality. Meaning, for example, the change in the quantity of heat in h2o yields a change in its state of matter, from solid, to liquid, to gas. These kinds of changes aren't usually linear. For example, there's not a specific number of grains of rice in a pot of rice, just at some point after adding rice, you'll have a pot. Socially, small changes in relationships and ideas can suddenly reach a point where something historical happens, like a mass movement or a war. People don't always see these changes, until they've piled up really high just before something erupts. Small changes in genetic mutations will produce a new species. In language, pronunciation and grammar change over time, until the language becomes so different it is not mutually intelligible with its old form or related languages, and so on. Materialism means that matter comes before ideas. "I am, therefore I think," instead of "I think, therfore I am." Hegel thought ideas changed history, but Marx said it was really changes in economic relationships, which are material relationships, that created the ideas which then changed history. The natural sciences are materialist, and developed by differentiating themselves from the idealism of religion and philosophy. Marx called early materialism "mechanistic materialism," because it followed a basic cause /effect relationship, and wasn't dialectical. Materialism doesn't erase LGBTQ, inherently, but it can be used that way by dishonest and opportunistic people who ignore both medical and social science, which are materialist, themselves. A materialist approach to gender and sexuality can be found in social sciences, for example in anthropology and sociology, which looks to document the existence and conditions of LGBTQ people. Marxists today overwhelmingly support LGBTQ liberation, but there are a minority of dissenters Engels, Marx's collaborator, wrote a book called The Family, Private Property, and the State which looks at how families and women's social position changed as economic relations change. We see that today, as we no longer live on family farms where men typically use their muscles to work the land and women tend the home, and men no longer have most of the legal rights to property. Machinery and liberal equal rights for women have changed our social relations, and have lead to the rise of queer liberation, also.
@@dogeyes7261 Thanks for that (I have saved it somewhere as it is a pretty good summary - and people rarely take the time to explain... LOL, they'll just call you a Nazi instead if you don't get it! I'm exaggerating). I've later come to understand that contradictions are important when it comes to Marxists: as in both Marxists and Capitalists can have a materialistic world view - but the Capitalist ignores the contradictions. Which ironically I think can make Marxists appear as Idealists compared to Capitalists. Random question: any thoughts on Acceleration - as in metres per second squared - when it comes to Idealism vs Materialism?
You do a really good job at explaining the concepts. I read "Capital" when I was first starting to get into reading regularly and remember struggling to understand the language used. After getting through the first parts of the book I started to grasp the style better. The parts detailing the suffering of the exploitation of child laborers stuck with me the most. I find tales of children suffering is the strongest use of literary pathos. They are innocent and don't deserve to suffer. To argue otherwise would make you a cold hearted monster. Ivan Karamazov uses a similar argument when talking with Alyosha. I doubt many communists actually read Capital but do you feel that Karl Marx happened to get his name attached to a system others abused or did he know what he was advocating would lead to in terms of communism?
+Awsomedrifter I don't think Marx's original intent was toward the more corrupted version of communism you tend to see practiced throughout history. But any ideology can be used in a corrupt way, whether that be a political or economic system, a religion or a philosophy. Ideologies are tools, they can be used to help or hurt. It's like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build a house or you can use it to kill somebody.
The Black Ponderer that corrupted version of communism dissolved the Tzarist empire, gave starving peasants control of the land they worked, transformed a backwards nation into an industrial powerhouse which rivaled the Capitalist empires, ended unemployment giving every citizen the right to a job, reduced rents to 5 percent of income, invested hugely into infrastructure so the economy was focused on building subways and other useful necessities of the people rather than the stock market, sported an economic growth of 7 percent in contrast to the US stagflation period, never committed crimes of genocide against a weaker people to ensure their people would be open to exploitation, and so on. The CCCP of course won the war against the Nazis killing 4 out of 5 of them and storming Berlin. What terrible things did they actually do or are you, an obviously well read person, just repeating anti communist propaganda as if modern history hasn't made you well aware of America's capacity to lie. You get that America was a capitalist country yet not that the capitalists would say anything to terrify the American people from following suit. When an American dies from being over worked or from being deprived of the necessities that isn't a crime. That is never counted against the capitalist order. Nobody cares for the working poor and much less for the dispossessed who die on the streets with no refuge. Are you talking about the Red Terror? You must have forgotten the part where the US and its capitalists allies teamed up to invade and slaughter the Russians in the words of Churchill, "to kill the baby in the cradle." Are you talking about gulags because that was their prison system not some magical death camp. It was pretty bad during the fascist invasion but America just up and locked up all of its Japanese population for no reason, and America as you are aware doesn't have much room to criticize another countries prison system. The CCCP also gave women suffrage in 1917, women's equality of a pay and equality of opportunity. They banned racial discrimination in 1917 as well. Homosexuality was legalized in the 60s but I might be a little off on the date. What about America? They've been slaughtering the international proletariat nonstop since the end of the war. When they don't kill them themselves they purchase banana republics to do the killing for them. Colombia is still a banana republic. The Soviets never forced an entire country to become a plantation for capitalists. The Maoists revolution was of course fought against an American proxy. You might instead of wondering what Mao was doing liberating the Chinese be wondering what America was doing killing them for their greed. America fought an imperialist war against Korea killing them senselessly until no building was left standing and then destroying their retention damns. South Korea was a military dictatorship, an American proxy, until the 90s or early 2000s when the people revolted. Before the Korean War Korea took turns being being an American and Japanese colony, so again a war of liberation. Before you criticize the DPRK you might also wonder what their politics would look like if America didn't have a weapons arsenal pointed at them on the south Korean side capable of killing them all which remember is what they did a few generations ago. The DPRK still has better economic growth than the US. China as well considering they're about to become the next superpower. I wonder what they would look like if instead of having a communist revolution they remained a colonial territory. That's the question we chose not to ask. The answer to that question is of course in South America and Africa. So maybe if you have read all of this would might reconsider how corrupt existing socialism was
im reading it...and up to about chapter 8...and to be honest...i havent learned anything from what marx wrote... i feel he was trying to be super intellectual, and in doing so, he basically breaks down very simple concepts into something confusing...i truly think he tried to sound clever whilst explaining something simple.. he overcomplicates matters and gets very repetitive and also throws in some latin to sound clever. so far i am not impressed and think i could have done a better job...and i am being deadly serious.
@@theblackponderer pretty much everything....its a big book so theres so much i could write much more concise.. Everything from pages and pages of C-m-c through to repeating for each sale there is a buy ....through to reams and reams about ..commodities can be compared to other commodities, to ascertain value but cant be compared to themselves to ascert value...i mean the guy is basically just repeating himself time and time again and in such a way as it seems HE IS confused over simple economics. i can write in one sentence what he wrote in 100 pages... a commodity is a thing of value...use value and exchange value..you may have a commodity that has great use value for you, but if you dont want to exchange it ..it is not a commodity.. a commodities value can be determined by its magnitude when compared with every other commodity. rather than do this we choose to use one single commodity called gold as the standard. now every commodity can have a price based on the gold standard.... when you make a sale somene else makes a purchase...the money he uses to make a purchase comes from the sale of one or more commodities, and these sales and purchases basically circulate commodities. i could go on all day ..but i think you get the point. he even spouts total useless bane statements like....without a buyer ...you cannot sell something....and without a seller ..you can not buy something.... i mean come on man.
@@runthomas Well, a lot of the book is actual records and financial data which demonstrates what he's talking about. That's very important to have, which is a significant distinction of Marx. Marx doesn't just make claims from opinion or intuition. He actually backs up his claims with lots of data tables and references. Many people make claims without any factual data to back up what they are saying. But what's cool about Marx is that he doesn't do that. He makes a claim and then he shows real data that backs up his claim. The argument Marx is making in Capital is that capitalism is an economic system of exploitation. To this day, many people do not believe that. But Marx makes it so you don't have to just go on belief or faith. All one needs to do is consult the many tables in Capital which demonstrate that there actually is an unequal relationship between the value a laborer is providing and what the laborer receives in return. It may be a simple concept but the fact that many people to this day think capitalism is fair, shows that a lot of repetitious explaining using facts is necessary to get the point across.
@@theblackponderer im not sure what you have read to date....but if you are interested you should read ...if you really want to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.... in current society , and how ruthlessly corrupt our nations are..(iam from uk you from usa)...and how colonialism and corporate slavery are very real.. you need to read. michael hudson...several of his books are finance capitalism and its discontents., killing the host, and j is for junk economics...these books will BLOW YOUR MIND. also read noam chomsky who rules hte world, manufacturing consent, understanding power about how our govts money launder, read treasure islands by nicholas shaxton moneyland by oliver bullough hot money and the politics of debt by r.t naylor. if you are still interested and are not running through the whitehouse with a loaded weapon...then there are more on better politics and more on govt schemes to implement their rules and gain power in other countries... these are not conspiracy books..they are all cited properly and will have you ripping your hair out with shock horror and disgust as you realise what is really going on in our corrupt economies. seems like you already know, but these books uncover a lot more than you could possibly expect. written by some of the greatest financial minds of our age. and one i have not read yet but will soon. joseph stiglitz ..the price of inequality..
@@armand9199 I've played that game. It's cool. Honestly it was a bit too meta for me though. Game felt a bit too disjointed for my preferred playstyle. I like a more cohesive play experience.
I love your videos and the time you put into them. One thing that confused me was how you could say in one breath that “capitalism is okay” and that “capitalism is based on non-equivalent exchange and exploitation of the laborer”. How do you justify this in your head?
You also called for regulations because without them, capitalism is theft. If this is true, that capitalism minus rules equals theft, then it is also true that capitalism equals theft plus rules.
@@augustlongpre64 Well, we just need to acknowledge that no system is perfect. All systems need administration or governance to work. No system operates on its own. So when I say capitalism is "okay", I mean that capitalism isn't "great" or "perfect". I mean that capitalism is alright but needs work. Capitalism can work but not in its current state. We need to acknowledge its flaws and improve it. And incorporating socialist functions is a fine way to improve it.
The best example comes from Ford after bringing in new machines and asking the union representative how he will get the machines to pay their dues. The union representative retorts by asking Ford how he will get the machines to buy his cars. Wealth concentrates at the top and the two classes become more polarized. The workers become proletarianized. Labor theory of value is a critique of capitalist exchange. Without a monopoly each producer will be in competition with the other, reducing prices to reflect labor. With the monopoly they can sell prices above their value but this only increases the proletarian character of the working class. You can provide credit to the working class so they can buy even without having money but you have only further commodified money and the creditors will demand more money than they lent and they will do so to the greatest extreme in their power. This only furthers the social contradiction being explained. Eventually people realize that the loans won't be repaid and this leads to a crisis as the assumed value of the debt, money as commodity, returns to its real value of nothing. At the end the solution to escape labor theory of value only made it worse. There is no escaping labor theory of value. This is the source of all economic crisis. It isn't a few criminal elements but the system of exploitation itself.
There are alternative theories. And modern capitalism, what marxists after Lenin call late-stage state monopoly capitalism, or imperialism, is heavily financialized. Industrial Capital is exported overseas, and banking takes hold of the commanding heights of the economy. But banks mostly produce fictitious capital, which disappears during crisis. Look at what happened to banks during 2008 But imagine this: You own a building full of tools. You and other investors pooled money and bought all this. You have drafted a business plan, own the patents. But none of the above matters until you buy labor to run those machines. And people’s subjective judgements of the value of the commodities you produce will not change how much you have to charge to stay competitive. The overall market conditions-the overall social relations-will dictate a base level cost of doing business, including the cost of living, raw materials, utilities, taxes, etc. Labor is where to this day businesses like Walmart and Amazon make cuts in order to pull ahead. Breakthroughs in robots and computers are directly related to the compulsive need to cut down “variable capital,” aka labor costs
@@theblackponderer "Socialists expect Capitalism to produce Poverty Yet Capitalism has increased the wealth of the workers Capitalism has proved to be a stable, secure system This means that workers accept Capitalism We have to take working men as they are Socialists should argue for piecemeal reforms under Capitalism" - Eduard Bernstein
@@mr.e2962 ...So how has capitalism proved to be a stable, secure system when there are regularly occurring economic repressions (some being extremely severe such as the Great Depression and Great Recession) as well as massive inequalities of wealth?
@@theblackponderer Read Adam Smith's first major work: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, or watch this video that summarizes it th-cam.com/video/gZIERdGGteg/w-d-xo.html
@@mr.e2962 ...What does Smith's concept of moral sentiments have to do with capitalism being stable and secure? How does Smith's theory answer the question I asked?
Hi Neal, since you have covered Marx in depth could you also cover both "Theory of Moral Sentiments" and "Wealth of Nations" by Capitalism founder Adam Smith? Also of interest will be the novel "Talon of God" by Actor and movie producer Wesley Snipes... could you cover those too??
The manifesto is more propaganda then philosophy. The ideas in the manifesto are basically the same as capital except dumbed down quite a bit and fanaticized a bit more. But it is a shorter read so it's not like you'd waste a ton of time reading it.
oh god I thought you seemed like such a cool person until you said you're actually NOT against capitalism and is actually a small business owner :( how anyone can read marx and come to the conclusion ''regulate capitalism'' is beyond me, as long as capital accumulation exists (which it has to under capitalism), the people will continue to be slaves under it. Take the text seriously instead, revolution is inevitable
guess that depends on your conditions, I know plenty of small businesses that don't even pay their employees real wages and act more like capitalists than workers. If you're in a position were you have to do fill the role of the worker yourself, and don't extract surplus value from potential employees specifically for profit, I wouldn't consider that a problem
Well, I am the latter case. Furthermore I think the text is more about highlighting the abuses of capitalism, rather than being an all out anti-capitalism text. Socialism can also be abused in such a way that exploits people beyond livable conditions, which we have seen in several historic cases. It's about how the system is implemented more so than the system itself. Much of the time Karl Marx was writing his Capital text, he received financial assistance from his friend, Friedrich Engels', family business. It was the company shares Engels' father owned which supported Marx while writing Capital. Also, to get Capital circulated, Marx had particular sections published in newspapers around the world. Newspapers are also commodities of business, helping Capital reach an international audience. Capitalism can be used positively but we must always be aware of how it can be abused and put measures in place to keep it in check.
If you think that Marx was not anti-capitalist you must have either not read the full text or misinterpreted it, Marx was also an active communist and a member of the first international. One of the main points of the book is how capitalism in it's essence has to continue to accumulate itself and continue to conquer the world in order for this process to continue on, there is no changing this system, that is why there is vast imperialism and global injustice. Another central point (introduced much later in the book) is the theory of classes and how he used Hegelian analysis methods and historical study to conclude that capitalism will inevitably end with the capitalist class being overthrown by the working class, as has happened with all previous class societies under their given conditions. You can't say the text is about highlighting the abuses of capitalism, because that is simply false, Marx's famous calling was ''workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains''. Oh and the argument about Engels and newspapers is quite silly, that doesn't mean that businesses are somehow worthwhile, it is entirely possible to produce a newspaper without capitalism, but in a capitalist system it is impossible to keep all of your activism apart from the capitalist system, obviously. The fact that marx HAD to abuse Engels capitalist status in order to keep writing is in itself a showcase of how destructive capitalism is, so you're contradicting yourself there. Thirdly, no, socialism can not be abused in an exploitative manner in the economy because socialism is by definition a system were the workers themselves control the means of production. I welcome critique of the soviet union, because they were active in actually destroying socialist methods within their own country. It's very reasonable to talk about how this happened and how Leninism made this reactionary counterrevolution possible however.
I'm going to have disagree with your opinion, good sir. I do believe there is value in capitalism because of its ability to create huge motivational drive toward progress, however I also believe that capitalism can be easily abused to benefit a select few at the expense of many. I also think that any system can be abused in this fashion whether it be political, economical, ideological, or social. Capital is a great read because of its heavy critique on capitalism but after reading it I was not motivated to completely abandon the business model. I'm fairly confident capitalism is here to stay. Despite the ups and downs its effects have had on society, I think overall the pros outweigh the cons. Ultimately it's up to us as a society, the general population, to keep the elite class in check, making sure that the monetary benefits of business are distributed equitably.
That's my bible comrade! Do Lenin next!
Yet you still work your 9-5 In a capitalistic system. Your only a socialist online.
@@lifeisabadjoke5750 You're probably stupid
@@lifeisabadjoke5750 go to bed
@@postmodernityarmageddon socialist online
Great content. This is helpful thank you. I’m tackling Capital and using a companion book to help me along. I will probably read this book more than once to better understand it. I’m on chapter 7 and counting....
Just out of interest, which companion did you use? And did you find it helpful?
@@LuisPerez-tx5jo David Harvey’s. He has one for volume 1 and volume 2. Volume 2 covers volume 3 as well. David Harvey also has a ton of TH-cam lectures that cover his books.
just coming across this channel, love your stuff
Thank you for taking your time to help me understand this
Thanks for watching!
Keep it up bruhh! ur helping so much with my classwork and coursework
+JPSMLV Glad I can help.
Did you actually read the whole book or listen to the audio. I’m listening to the audio idk how you had the patience to read this whole book must of took you so many days
I did indeed read all 3 volumes 👍🏾
joy to read? did actually read it? sounds like just read cliff notes))) it's very hard to read cause it's written in extremely convoluted language.
I did indeed read the book. Perhaps rereading the book might help you understand the language better.
Respect to you and anyone who can get through Das Kapital. I've got the PDF sitting on my computer - no way I'll get into it (at least not yet anyway). I understand the basic idea of Marx. And thanks again for such a great summary. I am not an expert. But I think Alienation is better to focus on than the economic exploitation based on Labour Value. And also the contradictions of supply and demand; as I think Marx was more in favour of economics where demand for products creates their supply rather than the other way around. 'Say's Law' is that supply creates demand - that people would buy products (whether they needed them or not) and then keep re-selling them using the profit motive, and the idea is that eventually through contiual exchange the right products would end up in the right hands. But I think Marx overturned this.
But I am wary of two things: the materialist frame work Marx uses and also modern approaches like network theory.
I'm not an expert. But I think Materialism as a philosophy can be very oppressive - as it only tells half the story. It basically eradicates LGBTQplus people - and in so doing eradicates everybodies intrinsic nature. So I think people should be careful in how they interpret Marx and be wary of his materialist lens. I've come to understand that materialism as a philosophy is different to materialism as a science. As a philosophy materialism seems concerned with 'motion' (hence I guess Marx's 'economic laws of motion' he uses) and our response to that, which we have evolved capacities for in the 'dorsal' part of our brains - executive planning (unique to humans), working memory (which are both unique to humans and 'higher' animals) and motor functions (that all animals share). As opposed to the 'ventral' part of our brain our long term emotional memories and fight/flight responses, metabolic homeostasis and also - evidence would suggest - innate properties such as gender identity and sexual orientation (at least emotionally - for example the motor sensory part in the dorsal part seems to also play a role in the body identity for trans people), and also our social conscious and dream experiences - all which seems in character to represent 'idealism'.
Marx seems to be using Materialism in the same way Camus does with the boulder being pushed up a hill analogy from his Myth of Sisyphus: idealism is all the emotional stress of pushing the boulder up the hill working towards some idealistic goal, while materialism is the boulder itself that is free to role back down hill again. And so I think Marx is saying that capitalism relies upon enforcing the idealistic aspects of 'forced labour' while the materialistic aspects of labour become secondary - which fair enough, but I am not sure I would apply that analysis to everything?
Quickly on modern approaches like Network Theory: I think you can see networks as fixed capital - where you can have many people in a network focused in on one individual say. An example would be fans of a celebrity - fans are more focused on the celebrity than each other. You can recreate Marx's alienation from this way of looking at things. Just put youtube (LOL) between the fans and the celebrity and hey presto you have the fixed capital. All the celebrity has to do then is get the 'fans' to work for them and you've got capitalism. Marx suggests the tedancy for the rate of profit to fall: so a solution there is to just expand the network, which is what capitalism does.
Paul Erdos and Stanley Milgrim looked at network effects with 'degrees of separation'. You can combine this with Pareto laws of wealth distribution to show that the more people are connected to one individual (a celebrity) and less to each other, then the more 'wealth' that goes to the person in the focus of the network (which is basically TH-cams business model I guess). For example (I won't go into the formulas though it's pretty simple: 1 - 1/Pareto Index = 1/degrees of separation) the Pareto law of 80% of profits going to 20% of people (which works out the same as 50% of profits going to 1% of people - basically what we see in the world today) is given by a degrees of separation of about 6 or 7. I.e. if the degrees of separation was less then the amount of profit going to the relatively few would be less. So that's something to think about with how corporations approach the internet and future streams of revenue, if wages were to fall for labourers and also profit per labourer was to also fall due to market forces of competition, buy building a more profitable infrastucture was required to get more profits out of them? - i.e. 'The Matrix' LOL.
I'd encourage you to open up your PDF of Das Kapital and start reading it with the goal of completing it. Marx has been interpreted in many different ways, several being misinterpretations. The best way to distinguish the misinterpretations from the valid ones, and make proper comparisons between Marxism and other economic theories is to read the origin texts yourself.
Motion comes from the dialectical part of Marx's philosophy. Dialectics holds that everything is in motion. Everything is in a period of transition from one state to another, based on both its internal contradictions as well as external contradictions. For example, our bodies are constantly creating new cells, constantly changing. If we exercise, our muscle cells respond and grow stronger. If we're exposed to carcinogens, our cells can become cancerous.
Changes in quantity yield a change in quality. Meaning, for example, the change in the quantity of heat in h2o yields a change in its state of matter, from solid, to liquid, to gas. These kinds of changes aren't usually linear. For example, there's not a specific number of grains of rice in a pot of rice, just at some point after adding rice, you'll have a pot. Socially, small changes in relationships and ideas can suddenly reach a point where something historical happens, like a mass movement or a war. People don't always see these changes, until they've piled up really high just before something erupts. Small changes in genetic mutations will produce a new species. In language, pronunciation and grammar change over time, until the language becomes so different it is not mutually intelligible with its old form or related languages, and so on.
Materialism means that matter comes before ideas. "I am, therefore I think," instead of "I think, therfore I am." Hegel thought ideas changed history, but Marx said it was really changes in economic relationships, which are material relationships, that created the ideas which then changed history. The natural sciences are materialist, and developed by differentiating themselves from the idealism of religion and philosophy. Marx called early materialism "mechanistic materialism," because it followed a basic cause /effect relationship, and wasn't dialectical.
Materialism doesn't erase LGBTQ, inherently, but it can be used that way by dishonest and opportunistic people who ignore both medical and social science, which are materialist, themselves. A materialist approach to gender and sexuality can be found in social sciences, for example in anthropology and sociology, which looks to document the existence and conditions of LGBTQ people. Marxists today overwhelmingly support LGBTQ liberation, but there are a minority of dissenters
Engels, Marx's collaborator, wrote a book called The Family, Private Property, and the State which looks at how families and women's social position changed as economic relations change. We see that today, as we no longer live on family farms where men typically use their muscles to work the land and women tend the home, and men no longer have most of the legal rights to property. Machinery and liberal equal rights for women have changed our social relations, and have lead to the rise of queer liberation, also.
@@dogeyes7261 Thanks for that (I have saved it somewhere as it is a pretty good summary - and people rarely take the time to explain... LOL, they'll just call you a Nazi instead if you don't get it! I'm exaggerating).
I've later come to understand that contradictions are important when it comes to Marxists: as in both Marxists and Capitalists can have a materialistic world view - but the Capitalist ignores the contradictions. Which ironically I think can make Marxists appear as Idealists compared to Capitalists.
Random question: any thoughts on Acceleration - as in metres per second squared - when it comes to Idealism vs Materialism?
Perfecto compañero!!
Keep on , Keeping on.
You do a really good job at explaining the concepts. I read "Capital" when I was first starting to get into reading regularly and remember struggling to understand the language used. After getting through the first parts of the book I started to grasp the style better. The parts detailing the suffering of the exploitation of child laborers stuck with me the most.
I find tales of children suffering is the strongest use of literary pathos. They are innocent and don't deserve to suffer. To argue otherwise would make you a cold hearted monster. Ivan Karamazov uses a similar argument when talking with Alyosha. I doubt many communists actually read Capital but do you feel that Karl Marx happened to get his name attached to a system others abused or did he know what he was advocating would lead to in terms of communism?
+Awsomedrifter I don't think Marx's original intent was toward the more corrupted version of communism you tend to see practiced throughout history. But any ideology can be used in a corrupt way, whether that be a political or economic system, a religion or a philosophy. Ideologies are tools, they can be used to help or hurt. It's like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build a house or you can use it to kill somebody.
The Black Ponderer that corrupted version of communism dissolved the Tzarist empire, gave starving peasants control of the land they worked, transformed a backwards nation into an industrial powerhouse which rivaled the Capitalist empires, ended unemployment giving every citizen the right to a job, reduced rents to 5 percent of income, invested hugely into infrastructure so the economy was focused on building subways and other useful necessities of the people rather than the stock market, sported an economic growth of 7 percent in contrast to the US stagflation period, never committed crimes of genocide against a weaker people to ensure their people would be open to exploitation, and so on. The CCCP of course won the war against the Nazis killing 4 out of 5 of them and storming Berlin. What terrible things did they actually do or are you, an obviously well read person, just repeating anti communist propaganda as if modern history hasn't made you well aware of America's capacity to lie. You get that America was a capitalist country yet not that the capitalists would say anything to terrify the American people from following suit. When an American dies from being over worked or from being deprived of the necessities that isn't a crime. That is never counted against the capitalist order. Nobody cares for the working poor and much less for the dispossessed who die on the streets with no refuge. Are you talking about the Red Terror? You must have forgotten the part where the US and its capitalists allies teamed up to invade and slaughter the Russians in the words of Churchill, "to kill the baby in the cradle." Are you talking about gulags because that was their prison system not some magical death camp. It was pretty bad during the fascist invasion but America just up and locked up all of its Japanese population for no reason, and America as you are aware doesn't have much room to criticize another countries prison system. The CCCP also gave women suffrage in 1917, women's equality of a pay and equality of opportunity. They banned racial discrimination in 1917 as well. Homosexuality was legalized in the 60s but I might be a little off on the date. What about America? They've been slaughtering the international proletariat nonstop since the end of the war. When they don't kill them themselves they purchase banana republics to do the killing for them. Colombia is still a banana republic. The Soviets never forced an entire country to become a plantation for capitalists. The Maoists revolution was of course fought against an American proxy. You might instead of wondering what Mao was doing liberating the Chinese be wondering what America was doing killing them for their greed. America fought an imperialist war against Korea killing them senselessly until no building was left standing and then destroying their retention damns. South Korea was a military dictatorship, an American proxy, until the 90s or early 2000s when the people revolted. Before the Korean War Korea took turns being being an American and Japanese colony, so again a war of liberation. Before you criticize the DPRK you might also wonder what their politics would look like if America didn't have a weapons arsenal pointed at them on the south Korean side capable of killing them all which remember is what they did a few generations ago. The DPRK still has better economic growth than the US. China as well considering they're about to become the next superpower. I wonder what they would look like if instead of having a communist revolution they remained a colonial territory. That's the question we chose not to ask. The answer to that question is of course in South America and Africa. So maybe if you have read all of this would might reconsider how corrupt existing socialism was
im reading it...and up to about chapter 8...and to be honest...i havent learned anything from what marx wrote...
i feel he was trying to be super intellectual, and in doing so, he basically breaks down very simple concepts into something confusing...i truly think he tried to sound clever whilst explaining something simple..
he overcomplicates matters and gets very repetitive and also throws in some latin to sound clever.
so far i am not impressed and think i could have done a better job...and i am being deadly serious.
So in your words, what is Marx explaining that can be said more simply?
@@theblackponderer pretty much everything....its a big book so theres so much i could write much more concise..
Everything from pages and pages of C-m-c through to repeating for each sale there is a buy ....through to reams and reams about ..commodities can be compared to other commodities, to ascertain value but cant be compared to themselves to ascert value...i mean the guy is basically just repeating himself time and time again and in such a way as it seems HE IS confused over simple economics.
i can write in one sentence what he wrote in 100 pages...
a commodity is a thing of value...use value and exchange value..you may have a commodity that has great use value for you, but if you dont want to exchange it ..it is not a commodity..
a commodities value can be determined by its magnitude when compared with every other commodity.
rather than do this we choose to use one single commodity called gold as the standard. now every commodity can have a price based on the gold standard....
when you make a sale somene else makes a purchase...the money he uses to make a purchase comes from the sale of one or more commodities, and these sales and purchases basically circulate commodities.
i could go on all day ..but i think you get the point.
he even spouts total useless bane statements like....without a buyer ...you cannot sell something....and without a seller ..you can not buy something....
i mean come on man.
@@runthomas Well, a lot of the book is actual records and financial data which demonstrates what he's talking about. That's very important to have, which is a significant distinction of Marx. Marx doesn't just make claims from opinion or intuition. He actually backs up his claims with lots of data tables and references. Many people make claims without any factual data to back up what they are saying. But what's cool about Marx is that he doesn't do that. He makes a claim and then he shows real data that backs up his claim. The argument Marx is making in Capital is that capitalism is an economic system of exploitation. To this day, many people do not believe that. But Marx makes it so you don't have to just go on belief or faith. All one needs to do is consult the many tables in Capital which demonstrate that there actually is an unequal relationship between the value a laborer is providing and what the laborer receives in return. It may be a simple concept but the fact that many people to this day think capitalism is fair, shows that a lot of repetitious explaining using facts is necessary to get the point across.
@@theblackponderer im not sure what you have read to date....but if you are interested you should read ...if you really want to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes....
in current society , and how ruthlessly corrupt our nations are..(iam from uk you from usa)...and how colonialism and corporate slavery are very real..
you need to read.
michael hudson...several of his books are finance capitalism and its discontents., killing the host, and j is for junk economics...these books will BLOW YOUR MIND.
also read noam chomsky
who rules hte world, manufacturing consent, understanding power
about how our govts money launder, read treasure islands by nicholas shaxton
moneyland by oliver bullough
hot money and the politics of debt by r.t naylor.
if you are still interested and are not running through the whitehouse with a loaded weapon...then there are more on better politics and more on govt schemes to implement their rules and gain power in other countries...
these are not conspiracy books..they are all cited properly and will have you ripping your hair out with shock horror and disgust as you realise what is really going on in our corrupt economies.
seems like you already know, but these books uncover a lot more than you could possibly expect. written by some of the greatest financial minds of our age.
and one i have not read yet but will soon.
joseph stiglitz ..the price of inequality..
@@runthomas I've read all three volumes of Capital. Check out my videos for more of my reading history.
Such a great video man!
Do 'Imperialism the highest stage of capitalism' By Lenin please
Is that pendant from the game lunar 2: eternal blue?
Yup. I'm a gamer.
@@theblackponderer you might want to check out nier automata since the game references philosophy so much
@@armand9199 I've played that game. It's cool. Honestly it was a bit too meta for me though. Game felt a bit too disjointed for my preferred playstyle. I like a more cohesive play experience.
awesome vids my man
+drumline75 Thanks, bruh.
Thank you for what you are doing.
Thanks for watching!
I love your videos and the time you put into them. One thing that confused me was how you could say in one breath that “capitalism is okay” and that “capitalism is based on non-equivalent exchange and exploitation of the laborer”. How do you justify this in your head?
You also called for regulations because without them, capitalism is theft. If this is true, that capitalism minus rules equals theft, then it is also true that capitalism equals theft plus rules.
@@augustlongpre64 Well, we just need to acknowledge that no system is perfect. All systems need administration or governance to work. No system operates on its own. So when I say capitalism is "okay", I mean that capitalism isn't "great" or "perfect". I mean that capitalism is alright but needs work. Capitalism can work but not in its current state. We need to acknowledge its flaws and improve it. And incorporating socialist functions is a fine way to improve it.
Reading the Essence of Christianity by Feuerbach. Has anyone read this?
Is the labor theory of value still valid?
Yes.
The Black Ponderer What do you think of its criticisms?Why do you consider that it is still valid?
It's criticisms come from corporate greed. It's still valid because social labor cost is important.
The best example comes from Ford after bringing in new machines and asking the union representative how he will get the machines to pay their dues. The union representative retorts by asking Ford how he will get the machines to buy his cars. Wealth concentrates at the top and the two classes become more polarized. The workers become proletarianized. Labor theory of value is a critique of capitalist exchange. Without a monopoly each producer will be in competition with the other, reducing prices to reflect labor. With the monopoly they can sell prices above their value but this only increases the proletarian character of the working class. You can provide credit to the working class so they can buy even without having money but you have only further commodified money and the creditors will demand more money than they lent and they will do so to the greatest extreme in their power. This only furthers the social contradiction being explained. Eventually people realize that the loans won't be repaid and this leads to a crisis as the assumed value of the debt, money as commodity, returns to its real value of nothing. At the end the solution to escape labor theory of value only made it worse. There is no escaping labor theory of value. This is the source of all economic crisis. It isn't a few criminal elements but the system of exploitation itself.
There are alternative theories. And modern capitalism, what marxists after Lenin call late-stage state monopoly capitalism, or imperialism, is heavily financialized. Industrial Capital is exported overseas, and banking takes hold of the commanding heights of the economy. But banks mostly produce fictitious capital, which disappears during crisis. Look at what happened to banks during 2008
But imagine this:
You own a building full of tools. You and other investors pooled money and bought all this. You have drafted a business plan, own the patents.
But none of the above matters until you buy labor to run those machines.
And people’s subjective judgements of the value of the commodities you produce will not change how much you have to charge to stay competitive. The overall market conditions-the overall social relations-will dictate a base level cost of doing business, including the cost of living, raw materials, utilities, taxes, etc.
Labor is where to this day businesses like Walmart and Amazon make cuts in order to pull ahead. Breakthroughs in robots and computers are directly related to the compulsive need to cut down “variable capital,” aka labor costs
Read the wealth of nations and compare it to capital vol. 1-3
Why don't you just give me a synopsis, bruh?
@@theblackponderer
"Socialists expect Capitalism to produce Poverty
Yet Capitalism has increased the wealth of the workers
Capitalism has proved to be a stable, secure system
This means that workers accept Capitalism
We have to take working men as they are
Socialists should argue for piecemeal reforms under Capitalism"
- Eduard Bernstein
@@mr.e2962 ...So how has capitalism proved to be a stable, secure system when there are regularly occurring economic repressions (some being extremely severe such as the Great Depression and Great Recession) as well as massive inequalities of wealth?
@@theblackponderer Read Adam Smith's first major work: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, or watch this video that summarizes it
th-cam.com/video/gZIERdGGteg/w-d-xo.html
@@mr.e2962 ...What does Smith's concept of moral sentiments have to do with capitalism being stable and secure? How does Smith's theory answer the question I asked?
Hi Neal, since you have covered Marx in depth could you also cover both "Theory of Moral Sentiments" and "Wealth of Nations" by Capitalism founder Adam Smith?
Also of interest will be the novel "Talon of God" by Actor and movie producer Wesley Snipes... could you cover those too??
I'll take those into consideration.
read 'the communist manifesto' bro.
I will eventually. Not before I read Capital Volumes II & III however :-)
The manifesto is more propaganda then philosophy. The ideas in the manifesto are basically the same as capital except dumbed down quite a bit and fanaticized a bit more. But it is a shorter read so it's not like you'd waste a ton of time reading it.
@@jonathancribbs1298 not propaganda just the critic's of capitalism in the simplest of terms
oh god I thought you seemed like such a cool person until you said you're actually NOT against capitalism and is actually a small business owner :( how anyone can read marx and come to the conclusion ''regulate capitalism'' is beyond me, as long as capital accumulation exists (which it has to under capitalism), the people will continue to be slaves under it. Take the text seriously instead, revolution is inevitable
So you are anti small business?
guess that depends on your conditions, I know plenty of small businesses that don't even pay their employees real wages and act more like capitalists than workers. If you're in a position were you have to do fill the role of the worker yourself, and don't extract surplus value from potential employees specifically for profit, I wouldn't consider that a problem
Well, I am the latter case. Furthermore I think the text is more about highlighting the abuses of capitalism, rather than being an all out anti-capitalism text. Socialism can also be abused in such a way that exploits people beyond livable conditions, which we have seen in several historic cases. It's about how the system is implemented more so than the system itself. Much of the time Karl Marx was writing his Capital text, he received financial assistance from his friend, Friedrich Engels', family business. It was the company shares Engels' father owned which supported Marx while writing Capital. Also, to get Capital circulated, Marx had particular sections published in newspapers around the world. Newspapers are also commodities of business, helping Capital reach an international audience. Capitalism can be used positively but we must always be aware of how it can be abused and put measures in place to keep it in check.
If you think that Marx was not anti-capitalist you must have either not read the full text or misinterpreted it, Marx was also an active communist and a member of the first international. One of the main points of the book is how capitalism in it's essence has to continue to accumulate itself and continue to conquer the world in order for this process to continue on, there is no changing this system, that is why there is vast imperialism and global injustice. Another central point (introduced much later in the book) is the theory of classes and how he used Hegelian analysis methods and historical study to conclude that capitalism will inevitably end with the capitalist class being overthrown by the working class, as has happened with all previous class societies under their given conditions. You can't say the text is about highlighting the abuses of capitalism, because that is simply false, Marx's famous calling was ''workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains''.
Oh and the argument about Engels and newspapers is quite silly, that doesn't mean that businesses are somehow worthwhile, it is entirely possible to produce a newspaper without capitalism, but in a capitalist system it is impossible to keep all of your activism apart from the capitalist system, obviously. The fact that marx HAD to abuse Engels capitalist status in order to keep writing is in itself a showcase of how destructive capitalism is, so you're contradicting yourself there.
Thirdly, no, socialism can not be abused in an exploitative manner in the economy because socialism is by definition a system were the workers themselves control the means of production. I welcome critique of the soviet union, because they were active in actually destroying socialist methods within their own country. It's very reasonable to talk about how this happened and how Leninism made this reactionary counterrevolution possible however.
I'm going to have disagree with your opinion, good sir. I do believe there is value in capitalism because of its ability to create huge motivational drive toward progress, however I also believe that capitalism can be easily abused to benefit a select few at the expense of many. I also think that any system can be abused in this fashion whether it be political, economical, ideological, or social. Capital is a great read because of its heavy critique on capitalism but after reading it I was not motivated to completely abandon the business model. I'm fairly confident capitalism is here to stay. Despite the ups and downs its effects have had on society, I think overall the pros outweigh the cons. Ultimately it's up to us as a society, the general population, to keep the elite class in check, making sure that the monetary benefits of business are distributed equitably.