I'm copying from >>/liberty/53008 (that poster isn't me tho)

Marx's strongest opposition was Friedrich List, who he attacked in his critique on nationalism
time has shown that List won between the two

But it was not made in good faith, some of those are just insults, others are simply lies.

Dude I don't think anyone's gonna go through this piece by piece.

Lol. Capital isn't Marx's only work. In other works, such as Value, Price, and Profit, he does justify many of his ideas in the style of a debate. He breaks it down quite logically.

Marx was one of the originators, he expanded off some people's work, such as Hegel for his dialectical materialism, Proudhon for his socialist conceptions. Throughout his work he cites numerous authors, such as Adam Smith. But in a way he is an originator, and as a result it was other people that built off of HIM. Just like those libertarian thinkers were doing to their originators.

Whoever wrote this has no idea what they are talking about. Have you ever seen Capital? Its fucking huge, and complex as fuck. It would be like if all the writers of the bible wrote it using calculus.

I'm experiencing this writing now in scientific publication, often times you need to step away from it and think about something else, you get writers block or stuck on a concept and need time to distract yourself. The guy who wrote this probably hasn't even read it, and adds subjective ad hominem to his "critique"

I don't understand this obsession with adhomming away Marx's work with all these "lol he was lazy" "lol he got side-tracked" stories. He was a pretty prolific writer. There's plenty in Capital regarding Adam Smith's work. I haven't read much on his work in Russia in his late life, but from what I understand he simply viewed it as a more urgent concern than writing Capital because he saw potential in the Russian agrarian communes or something.
Anyways let's go over these questions about Marx's work
Well, first off it's not his. You already know this more than likely, but of course he was working within a framework that was to a large extent based on the work of other economists at the time. But further, I think there is something to the idea that for him, the goal was not to defend a new economic theory but to conduct a critical examination the categories political economy had produced at that time. He was trying to show how economics, with it's rather limited scope will tend to produce nothing but apology for the way things are and he did so by closely examining these basic categories in economics at the time which no one else really bothered to examine.
That said, if you want a rather basic statement of his understanding of value, "wage labor and capital" works pretty well. Perhaps this might count as a defense of the LVT in a sense as well:
you'll have to explain what you mean in more depth here. For Marx, commodity production is necessarily social. Values are realized on the market and this the measurement of products in terms of abstract value is a social process. That's at least my understanding. I see no problem here with Marx's concept of social necessity unless you're referring to something else.
Once again, could you point to any specific passages here? I'm not sure it makes sense to view exploitation as simply a numerical sort of phenomena though as in "workers get less money for their wages than they produce." That's just a relevant implication of exploitation. Marx describes exploitation as the process in which those who have nothing to sell but their labor time sell themselves on the market. The capitalist uses them and in doing so produces profit. This should not simply be thought of as a moral criticism of stealing as everyone trying to refute it likes to reduce it to. He is careful to emphasize that this transaction does not violate the logic of capitalism so saying "they're stealing workers' property" is wrongheaded. He was concerned with its implications as far as how an economy based on this exploitation tends to produce crises, war, repressive states etc.
This one I'll admit I know very little about. I've only read engels' Origins of the Family here. I'll leave it for someone else.

Marx died before he could finish the second and third volumes of Capital.

Well at least the guy had the decency not to say that old "NEET who never worked" Holla Forumsism.

Alright, I bite.

Saying something like this is really vague. Add some articles. Aside from that, Marx was more interested in opposing other strains of socialism, because his theory was supposed to be used by socialists. Why would he try to argue with capitalists who obviously are going to dismiss him before actually reading Marx's work. Not only that, but Marx worked to help the proletariat and hardly cared about reforming economics. Since the purpose of Marxism was to oppose capitalism, not replace it with capitalism with a human face.

I don't see how this is even important. Unless if you mean SNLT.

I assume it refers to extraction of surplus value. I don't know what people thought about this concept back in the 1800's. Exploitation is exactly what extracting surplus value is. Someone uses you to gain monetary gain, while not giving you the fair share of work. I know that libertarians will start barking about job creators and investments. The truth is that cutting away the middle man always leads to more profit. The only reason we need to work is to pay bills, because we had to rent an apartment, and need to buy food. Why not just create all of these and distribute them for free. Our work becomes commodities which we need. Instead of work becoming money. And no one will deny that there will be difficulties with distribution and management. However, those issues are less saying than what capitalism has caused the past 200 years.

It is true that Marx was a mess when it came to writing Das Kapital. The 2. and 3. volumes could be called incomplete. So they might have been parts missing. I don't see how this makes his completed works invalid. Remember that these are based on Hegelian philosophy. Therefore they change based on where you apply them. The stages of history are used to predict how history will progress. It is obvious that things don't always go as planned. The Soviet Union failed to achieve the Hegelian Aufhebung. Whether it is because of a failure in Marxist ideas, or if it was because the conditions weren't right, isn't completely clear. ( I personally believe that the theory lacks a psychological aspect). Even Marx thought that Russia would have a better chance by skipping the capitalist stage and going directly into agrarian communism instead.

Like I mentioned, it is based on philosophy applied to the real world. It is based on trends which persisted through western/middle eastern civilisation. It is induction, where you try to model a theory based on the results of prior civilisations. The stages are based on the material conditions of the time, while the transition is based on the Hegelian dialectic. Where the conditions are forced to change because of internal contradictions.

He gave multiple accounts of how rovulations might progress. The reason he didn't write a "Communist Rovultion for Dummies", is because the revolution shapes differently based on the material conditions of the region. Germany would have worked well as a communist country, because capitalism had taken strong roots. This meant that there was plenty of factories which could create commodities for the people, once they took over. For Russia it meant that they either had to force State Capitalism to create the factories (akin to the 5 year plan) and then transition over to communism. Which sadly never happened. Again if it was due to the conditions or the theory is unclear.

Fascism is the authoritarian form of capitalism (more so than the usual). It uses no theory, so it lends itself even better to these causes. Aside from that, the whole point was to interpreted it and apply it to your own cause. That is exactly why there are so many examples of Marx. No one has to follow the footsteps of Stalin, it was just easier to do so. There was Bordiga who was so anti-authoritarian that he decided not to do anything when fascists took over. Because he thought it would have been a misuse of power.

This is my personal take on it.

I will never understand why people cannot seem to grasp the basic grammatical concept of subject-verb agreement. And yet later on you correctly use the word "whom."

youtube.com/watch?v=dGT-hygPqUM&list=PL3F695D99C91FC6F7

What would the right formulation be?

Good job pal

It should be "He and Engels." However, disregard what I said about subject-verb agreement. That's not what I meant to say. This is instead an issue of the difference between the subjective and objective cases.

no you stupid stormnigger stop insulting esoteric methods you don't understand just because """""""jooooooooze""""" preserved them

Maybe the user is not a native English speaker. I'm prone to the same mistake for example, because in French the correct formulation is "lui et Engels", that is "him and Engels".

Did Marx provide examples, case studies, or peer-reviewed research to support his claims and theories?

Marx didn't believe in the labor theory of value. If want what Marxists believe as far as economics go to be explained simply, I recommend watching the "Law Of Value" series.
youtube.com/watch?v=dGT-hygPqUM&list=PL3F695D99C91FC6F7
As for "social necessity", it's a way of judging whether labor is useful or not. If its product is brought as a certain value, then it becomes socially necessary labor and is therefore reproduced if it can be paid for. That's it.
The term "exploitation" means nothing to capitalists because it supposedly doesn't exist in their "free market". Marx uses it to refer to someone have to sell their labor power to make a living - when this happens, they produce a certain amount of value embodied in the commodity produced. They, however, only get back part of this value as their wage - the rest is stolen by the capitalist, thus making their labor exploited by the bourgeoisie in order for them to gain their profit. I don't recall ever seeing him use it otherwise.
For people organizing certain modes of production under certain material circumstances, one only needs to look at how primitive communism is extremely common and how it's only preserved in a few cases (most notably Iroquois) when society enlarges itself beyond the scope of a village; at this point, society develops state and laws and all the other trappings of modern society predicted by historical materialism. As for the dialectical aspect, I think it's bullshit (this is the main reason why I'm not a Marxist). I'm still waiting for someone to defend it properly. It's ridiculous to think that the whole thing is a priori, though. He did a lot of studies prior to writing Capital.
(cont.)

(cont)
This is specifically because he disagreed with the utopians and thought that socialism/communism (communism, for Marx, was the variety of socialism advocated by him) had to arise by the spontaneous actions of the people in reaction to their material circumstances and what they demanded. Capitalism wasn't invented by Adam Smith or any other one individual - it developed over centuries, only toppling the preceding order's final political remnants once it had firm economic hegemony. He did take it too far, but it wasn't because he was a "lazy intellectual" with no real desire or plan for change.
His thought evolved significantly on the topic of Russia after conducting various studies of Native American tribes and their relevance both to future communism and how to achieve it. He was simply a prolific learner and interested in a lot of different things, if to the detriment of his works's ability to guide future thinkers in that it took away time from his writing.
He was almost finished with Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, which were later published. You're ahistorical and disingenuous if you really believe this claptrap.
His ideas were descended directly from Adam Smith and David Ricardo, influencing him both directly via his own readings of them and indirectly via the development of their ideas in the writings of the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill were both utilitarian vulgar economists and bastardizations of previous liberal thought - just because they're widely read doesn't mean that they're intellectually worth anything. By their time, their writings simply acted as justifications for the previously unseen mutations of capitalism - they were the first philosophical attempts to impose upon the human being the logic of capital as fully revealed by its development, in combination with an aristocratic disdain for their fellow man. Just because you think they're relevant doesn't mean that they were actually relevant at the time - workers revolted regularly, and if it wasn't shown that utopians (although Proudhon was not one) didn't propose realistic models to achieve socialism, then the movement likely would have failed repeatedly and extinguished itself.
They absolutely should lock this thread - your critiques are so far off the mark and easily refuted that I find it hard to believe that you're posing them seriously.

Based Saloth proven right once more.

How can anyone take Marx seriously if he does not substantiate his claims?

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/ethnographical-notebooks/notebooks.pdf
It took me less than half a minute of looking at Wikipedia's "Karl Marx" page to find this. This is a whole new level of illiteracy on your part. Why should anyone take you seriously and argue with you if you can't make that kind of basic effort?

>>>Holla Forums

Thank you. Briefly going through this, it gives a summary on Marx's commentaries on other peoples works, but doesn't connect how these studies support his claims. These were printed posthumously, so could you please provide the sources he used in his published works?

"Surplus value" is the price of using machines, resources, and a workspace provided for by your boss.

The labour theory of value was formulated by david ricardo and was a key component in classical economics.

The marginalists were actually reacting to marx, so its no wonder he didn't take into account a theory produced after his own death.

But all those things are created by other workers, not by the boss…

All the boss is doing is buying labour low, using it to create goods that can be sold expensively and pocketing the difference.

The workers have to sell their labour cheaply because they cannot go into business for themselves.

Nothing is physically stopping you from opening a co-op and sharing profits equally. Thousands of them already exist, including my favorite bar.

those machines were built by contracted labour, not the workers at the factory

resources were provided by vendors

Contracted labour which had its surplus value extracted in another company.

ebin

And from where do the vendor got the ressources?

so those other companies now share some of the factory's continued production? they can get quite wealthy by doing a job once.

its exploitation all the way down, back to the days of primitive accumulation when the land was siezed by force by porky's forefathers and the peasantry made landless.

Problem is, its much easier to accumulate capital to start a business if you are already porky. Capital tends to concentrate over time as companies produce with greater economies of scale and greater mechanization.

The days of individualism and self-sufficiency are over. Most people are either porkies or plebs

Well, that's Proudhon's mutualist anarchism (an early variety of anarchism later supplanted by its now-dominant communist and syndicalist children) in a nutshell. Understanding it and its flaws, I believe, is key to understand Marx - in fact, I'd say that Marx's thought grew directly out of early anarchism more than out of anything else, being a reaction of classical republican thought (a la Jacobin) to it.

Marx's critique of Proudhon's mutualism (the name for his proposed anarchist economic system of a free market of worker's cooperatives and community-owned banks) was that, by keeping markets, the Law Of Value would remain and capital would continue to discipline labor, thus making the market itself an abstract capitalist. As such, the system would either revert to present capitalism or transform into a form of "true" socialism inevitably.

What do I mean by this in concrete terms?

Take a firm which makes basketballs. It relies on a machine to cut the rubber and workers to stitch and inflate the results. The owner, be it a capitalist or the collective of the workers themselves, must reinvest profits in improving their capital goods (the machinery) if they wish to keep up with competitors. When the machine is improved and competitors surpassed, superprofits (or what vulgar bourgeois economists usually treat as profit) are created. The machine does not serve to reduce labor efforts, but rather to increase the rate at which it is extracted - the worker must keep up part and parcel with the machine. It lowers the amount of labor time required to create a particular amount of a good in demand. In Marxian terminology, it reduces the socially necessary labor time. Thus, improvements in capital in a market economy never serve to improve anyone's welfare, but rather to facilitate further capital accumulation - the acquisition of money just as well in Marx's term, because he saw money and MoPs (what bourgeois economics call "capital goods" exclusively) and labor as all being interchangeable manifestations of value created by the worker and determined by the consumer. In fact, his radical critique of preceding economics (then called "political economy", hence "Das Kapital: A Critique Of Political Economy) can be seen as a quasi-proto-Austrian, rather than post-Ricardian, sort of economics which far surpasses both.

In terms of what must be done in reality when following from this, workers must own their own firms, yes, but the market economy must also be replaced with a more decentralized, face-to-face democratic alternative. Marx never really spoke about this because he saw it as something which needed to arise organically from the people themselves.

Finally, the cooperatives which do exist are far more efficient than conventional businesses, but only insofar as they can run themselves because they have workers with the right kinds of mindset. Most people are incapable of following the logic of capital - reinvest all or almost all profit in the future accumulation of more capital - because they're too tempted to take the money and divide it up for their own use. They need capitalists under a market system, but not if an entirely new system tailor-made to the needs of humanity is built in its place.

econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Marx/mrxCpA34.html#Works and Authors
This is the list of citations in "Capital: A Critique Of Political Economy, Volume 1". Come on now, you don't think he pulled it out of his ass like a postmodernist social justice warrior would their "philosophy", do you? This guy was an actual intellectual who addressed real problems.

Have you considered that maybe not everyone who disagrees with you is a gullible dumbfuck who uncritically accepts the words of authors because they're long and confirm previously held beliefs?

Why does one have to be porky? Co-ops could provide their own capital or acquire a loan.

First of all, you're ignoring diseconomies of scale that would also play a role in a freer market. Second of all, it's not that hard to find investors or crowdfunding if you've got even a half way decent idea.

could you point to which ones are peer-reviewed studies? These are a lot to go through. The sources I've checked appear to be anecdotes and opinions of others.

According to Wikipedia, it took him 12 years of study in London's British Library
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital:_Critique_of_Political_Economy#Intellectual_influences
See the last paragraph here.

Plus, you're moving the goalposts. Your initial question was "did he pull it all out of his ass?", which is obviously "no". Now you're asking "did he have peer-reviewed studies", which is a difficult thing to answer when combing through the studies cited in the entire first volume of Capital - how do I check if a study from the middle of the 19th century was peer-reviewed?

As for a definitely peer-reviewed and highly influential source for Engel's book "Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State", see here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Society

I don't know that there is a list of all citations for all his works. That would easily number in the hundreds of pages. At the least, it's not as if he pulled his ideas out of thin air.

Thanks for the soruce, I will take a look.

that is why I asked. Normally when any scientist (including economists) construct theories they provide the data and a source from a previous study, and not from anecdotes, but I guess standards were different in the 19th Century.

Nope. I originally stared: "examples, case studies, or peer-reviewed research"