[cmrdporcupine]

The article is clearly written from a bit of a Marxian perspective and I think there's a lot assumed ... presuppositions about exploitation and value theory.

So yeah, even though on first skim I think I agree with the thrust of this article, I think you're right it's poorly defended, assuming it's at all for an audience outside of people who already think this way.

[api]

Marxism is back in vogue again. I guess people have tried reviving Naziism/fascism so now they’ve got to try reviving the other failed early 20th century totalistic political ideology.

I get that the status quo has huge issues, but can we have some new ideas maybe instead of continuing to try to revive late 19th century ones that have repeatedly and disastrously failed?

[rixed]

Certainly, to get new ideas it's better to start from a good knowledge of past ideas? If we had thrown an anathema on physics each time a rocket blowed up, nobody would have ever landed on the moon :)

[cmrdporcupine]

As a person with Marxian leanings I can tell you it's not "back in vogue" in fact in both academia and general populace actual Marxist theory has probably never been less vibrant or popular?

Maybe some people get that impression because they've conflated "Marxism" with general socialist urges or even cultural "left" wing identity politics, but that in fact is proof exactly of the opposite. It's never been more heretical to advocate for wealth redistribution or dismantling or restricting parts of the capitalist market, even in the context of a total ecological crisis brought on by industrial production and exponential growth.

It's not even on the table of discussion in any western country, so I am not sure where you fear comes from. That a claim like this could be made shows me exactly how far to the right we've drifted since e.g. the 60s. That someone like Mamdani could be smeared or red-baited as a "Marxist" for advocating for rent control is hilarious really.

(But frankly I'm not here to debate the merits or get into a drive-by debate with your half-formed opinions, nor was that the aim or thrust of what my comment above was about.)

[immibis]

> the other failed early 20th century totalistic political ideology.

I'm not sure how to square this statement with reality. Which countries were Marxist? The obvious "communist"/"socialist" country was the USSR, but it was Leninist/Stalinist.

[queenkjuul]

Ask the Chinese how poorly Marxism is treating them

[rixed]

I haven't read Marx since I left college, but in my remembering the only thing that is "theft" in the capital is the initial accumulation. There is no idea that any form of ownership beside that is theft (I don't believe there is any notion of "evil" either.) To be honest, you don't give the impression that you have read anything from the author that you are siting. Marx is like those ancient greek phylosophers and classical scientists who are "quoted" more often than read.

One could probably say that the privatisation of human communication is a form of "initial accumulation", or maybe just another step toward appropriation of culture, but that's apparently not the angle that the author decided to explore (can't be sure, I couldn't do better than skim that text which looked wrong in too many ways).

[cmrdporcupine]

"you don't give the impression that you have read anything from the author that you are siting"

Oh, ok. Anyways.

First section of Capital Vol I is all about "surplus value" and exploitation, with a heavy dose of the labour theory of value. It has nothing to do with "initial accumulation" at all, it's about ongoing extraction of surplus value in production, and no, Marx doesn't call it "theft" -- he calls it "exploitation" (which to him is actually somewhat of a value neutral world describing a technical process, actually).

Whether it's a defensible position in economics or philosophy is a whole other discussion. There's nuance.

Also I assuming you mean "citing", not "siting"

[rixed]

As the other person who responded to me wrote, I might have misunderstood your comment. I believed that you associated the idea that "property is theft" with Marx, and that's this association that I wanted to warn against.

But that's indeed not what you were saying.

[Retric]

I think you misunderstood his viewpoint.

Marx’s writing predates the US civil war. When you “own” someone and then “own” their labor the fruits of that labor aren’t yours any more than the person. By that reasoning, if you then use the fruits of that labor to buy a house it’s a stolen house.