[tehjoker]

Everyone that likes the New Deal should thank the union organizers and socialists that literally had to fight police in the streets to force the hand of the state. A large enough faction of the capitalists back then agreed to reforms because they feared things were going the way of revolution. In the 1930s, the 1917 revolution in Russia was a recent memory that scared the piss out of them.

Bezos would like to continue accumulating wealth from the labor of his workers without having to face real negotiations. A really great idea for anyone out of work that has any free time not applying for jobs right now would be to join labor discussion groups about the state of the economy and read some Marx. A great deal of those writings feels like hearing from Hari Seldon from Asimov's Foundation series given that we can look back 150 years and see that so many predictions and ways of thinking about the world were broadly true. Socialism or Barbarism as they say.

[badRNG]

While I don't think getting bogged down in a political discussion here is a good idea (and I don't necessarily disagree,) I do think it is interesting how ignorant Americans often are of the many literal battles in the war for humane working conditions.

It might be worth reading about how workers were bombed and gunned down during the labor movement (late 19th, early 20th centuries) in the US, notably the Battle of Blair Mountain [1]. Here is a good history of the different full battles waged in the late 19th and early 20th century by bosses and the police [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...

[supercollision]

+1 to your post and links. I'm also surprised by how much anti-union sentiment exists in the US; things like the 40-hour workweek and concept of overtime were paid for in blood.

[hannasanarion]

The US works hard to surpress labor history education. We even celebrate Labor Day in September, and as a result most Americans have never heard of the Haymarket Massacre, which is the whole reason it exists everywhere else in the world.

[burfog]

Now the work week is less than 30 hours. Yay! All it took was requiring health insurance for employees with 30 hours.

By that strategy, we could have a 10-hour work week if we wanted it.

[supercollision]

I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding your point, but might a union actually help in this case?

The 30 hour mandate is from the federal government as part of the Affordable Care Act. If someone was moved from 40 hours to 29 hours because of this, that's bad, but they were likely not a union member, right? Unions would have a negotiated contract for however many hours they wanted (either more or less than the norm), and would have also already negotiated benefits on the side so the incentive for the employer to cut to 30 hours would be gone.

Regarding the fewer hours points - I wasn't advocating that shorter weeks are always better, but rather that unions are responsible for, or at least contributed to, many of the gains that workers got over the last 150 years, and that IMO have been eroding.

Pretending we lived in the early 20th century, isn't the benefit of 40 hours a week in a factory over >60 hours a week in a factory clear? In terms of health and safety, unions have also made sure that e.g. you were less likely to become trapped and burn alive during the workday [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

[droptablemain]

The burden of health insurance shouldn't fall to the business anyway. It is the responsibility of the federal government.

[lvs]

This is an important argument that people miss. Cost increases in health care for government systems are managed at the government level, not at the level of individual companies. That's a pretty desirable situation for companies. Not only do companies make targets of themselves when they downgrade coverage, but the overall compensation is also less transparent to the worker when insurance is tied to the workplace. You get rid of all that stuff in a single payer system.

[terr-dav]

Withholding health insurance is also a powerful tool for breaking/preventing strikes. While it would save employers money, it would also reduce their leverage, and workers would be able to move on to other demands, or quit

huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5d814caae4b0ddcef50a1460

[Clubber]

That's one of the origins of the term "red neck."

[valas]

"read some Marx"... do you have some book in mind? Perhaps some good summary? I hear Capital is hard to parse.

So far my experience in trying to distill Marx is that he did reasonable assessment of the state of affairs at the time (i.e. identifying main classes in society of 1800s), but then his prescriptions of what to do (socialize means of production) did not work out anywhere. Maybe I'm reading wrong books.

[claudiawerner]

Whatever you do, do not only read the Manifesto. It was designed as an agitation pamphlet rather than an as a complete exposition of his thinking, and it is almost entirely devoid of his economic thought. As other commenters here have said, Wage Labour and Capital is a good read. You may also benefit from a companion guide if you want the full picture. Capitalism: A Companion to Marx's Economy Critique by Johan Fornas is a very high quality book, and relatively new; published by Routledge.

You will not come away with a good overview (whether you are sympathetic or not) just from the Manifesto. This is not enough to learn about Marx's thought. WLaC is better, but it too does not do a deep enough dive into the peak of his thought, nor his method of exposition. Capital, with a companion guide, is your best bet.

As another commenter here said, the first chapters (even as admitted by Marx himself) are difficult to get through, mainly due to the fact that Marx uses a dialectical presentation in his work, in which the most 'core' and highly abstract concept is dealt with first, before progressing to more concrete concepts. As such, the book gets easier as it goes on.

[tehjoker]

Like others have said, "The Communist Manifesto" is the easiest entry point. My copy also has "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" which some say is the work most descriptive of the US today. "The State and Revolution" by Lenin is a relatively easy and enlightening read as he talks about the nature of the capitalist state, the police, and other topics. "Reform or Revolution" by Rosa Luxemburg is also clarifying as it talks about why reformists have lost the thread. However, there are also many many many leftist podcasts you can listen to that can be easier to digest and will get you the basics, so that way when you read the original works later you have a baseline of understanding.

Capital is a doorstop, but I have heard that past chapter one which talks about the labor theory of value, the reading is much more breezy.

However, while some of these books are dense, even rural peasants have been able to read and metabolize these books, so don't despair!

[patrec]

Not, OP, and not well read in Marxist literature either (life is too short), but I can recommend The Communist Manifesto, it's short, quite lucid and of enormous historical influence (and would be worth reading for that reason alone). As you say, the interesting part is the analysis, the proposed remedies do not just look bad in hindsight, after tens of millions of dead bodies.

[GFischer]

Yep, I see that I tend to agree with the diagnosis of many such books.

The solutions, not so much.

But they're definitely worth reading.

[terr-dav]

Wage Labour and Captital

I haven't read through it yet, but it's relatively short, and it was recommended to me as a good starter.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/wag...

[edoceo]

Capital is not a hard read. Marx prescriptions were not perfect but the problem description from back then is surprisingly accurate for todays workers

[raxxorrax]

I think anything before the communist manifest is worth it. But it should always be read in context of the time of the industrial revolution and before.

[javert]

Marxism rewards the vicious and punishes the virtuous.

It's not in the interest of virtuous people to have Marxism. It's in their interest to have freedom, which implies capitalism.

[raxxorrax]

I don't think Marx always intended revolution and the term changed context later in his life, when reformation and revolution were distilled as two separate approaches. In my opinion this is still a fault line in modern leftist movements.

[JetSpiegel]

Capitalism rewards the vicious rentseeker and punishes the virtuous worker.

Any transfer of wealth towards weaker member of society is forbidden? Should we let babies starve, after all they don't literally pull their own weigth? What about disabled people?

[javert]

Capitalism rewards workers according to the utility of their contribution. Consider Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc.

Rentseekers in the literal sense (landlords) are not that big of a function of the economy. Rentseekers in the figurative sense (companies that use regulatory capture to extract wealth from others) are not a feature of capitalism, they are a feature of a mixed economy.

[tehjoker]

This is completely wrong. Marxism is presented as "scientific socialism" compared with former idealist versions that proliferated in the 1800s. While you can disagree with his conclusions, Marx presents a theory of class society, of the development of productive forces, and how these interact to advance the political forms of society which ends in revolution when the old structures and the new engines of society clash. He doesn't really go deeply into what "socialism" would look like, only that the clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, where the proletariat both massively outnumber the bourgeoisie and do all the work for survival wages presents a contradiction that will be resolved.

[javert]

Your post side-steps the issue I raised.

[adamsea]

I think their point was that when you said “Marxism rewards the vicious and punishes the virtuous“, what you said could make sense when talking about Marx-inspired ideologies / movements (the USSR, etc), but not so much about the actual writings and thought of Karl Marx himself.

I.e. that Marxist scholarship / thought does not have a one to one correspondence with Marxist-inspired social or political movements, of which there are many different kinds.

But the real question is why am I wasting my time on the internet writing this when the odds of you yourself wishing to step back and hear with open ears what I’m suggesting is quite low?

Which isn’t so much a statement about you, dear debate-opponent, as it is about the internet itself.

Getting people to waste time online - the capitalists greatest tool in the repression of the masses! LOL ;)

Maybe we’ll get immortalized in the Internet Archive ;););)

[javert]

I think my statement applies, or at least is likely to apply, under any implementation of Marx's ideas, and also has applied under every implementation that has been tried. If someone has a real counterpoint to that I'd be happy to hear it and engage with it.

I'm still kind of talking past the other person, and vice versa, but it's hard to have a good conversation about this, and I think it's important to say something to express my opposition to Marxism (though that's debatable---if nothing good/useful can be said, it's very debatable).

I would not have said anything on most discussion forums, but if there ever was a place where it's appropriate to speak up against Marxism when it rears its head, YC News is it. I think I can voice my pro-capitalist position politely and it's OK here, even if there is no traction in the conversation. I wouldn't do that on, say, reddit; I think it would be rude in that context, unless I can actually foster a meaningful conversation.

> the odds of you yourself wishing to step back and hear with open ears what I’m suggesting is quite low

Valid statement about the Internet in general, but culture can change, and we should strive to be better than that. In my own commenting history there are certainly bright and dark spots. I try to do the best I can.