/keynes/

socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2017/07/what-is-case-against-marxism-in-nutshell.html
Guys i read this and i think we just got BTFO. We should convert to Keynesian now.

Other urls found in this thread:

thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/06/23/europes-crisis-the-cluj-debate-with-mark-blyth/
thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/the-us-rate-of-profit-1948-2015/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

It's co-ops and MMT all the way down.

I'll have to read the entire thing later, but I'll say that I'm recently pretty critical of Marx and worried that most Marxists are too dogmatic, and that the left should definitely go in a more post-marxist direction that clearly takes the best from Marx and ditches what is otherwise useless.

Having said that, I don't think the blogger here understands Hegelianism. He makes this error in "A Devastating Contradiction in Marx’s Argument for the Labour Theory of Value", which is his linked blog about why Marx had some contradiction in his LTV. He references Marx's distinction between Use and Exchange value, and that Use Value doesn't determine the equality which allows different commodities to be exchanged. But he then quotes Marx as saying “Lastly, nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.” (Marx 1906: 48).

He criticizes this as contradictory, but this is a form of Hegelian distinction Marx is making. Of course, most Marxists understand this without even having read Hegel. Use Value and Exchange are two aspects of the same unified concept. For Hegel, his initial example of his logical method is being-nothing. To put it simply and draw the comparison, both being and nothing rely on each other to be sensible. You can't talk about being without talking about nothing, not-being. Hegel explicated this to draw attention to the excellent presupposition in formal logic which atomized different concepts like being and nothing, and said that they were not related, or divorced them through the law of identity. For Hegel, being and nothing are essentially the same thing, contained in a unified concept of moving thought which oscillates between the two.

But that is just one thing I noticed. This may or may not be fundamental to his point about the contradiction in Marx.

Don't marxists already do that? Most modern marxism - like 90% is made by marxist theorists that came after marx

They do, but a lot of rank and file internet Marxists seem pretty basic and purist. I don't totally fault them for that because we are all learning and a lot of us are young, but I hope everybody moves on from that eventually.

Also I keep making a dumb fucking error here but I didn't know we had word filters for Ess Jay Doubleu words.

These people seem a little like fascist entryists to me.

It also ignores the extent to which the prosperity of the advanced capitalist states is based upon the exploitation of the third world. It also doesn't really touch on the contradiction between use value and exchange value, or any of the other antagonisms of capitalism. And of course it doesn't bother trying to refute Marx's view of the state as an instrument of class warfare. The contradiction that supposedly btfos the labor theory of value is, upon closer inspection, absolutely fucking nothing.

literally a third of that blog post is about immigration
these people are definitely fascists

wew lad.

Nevermind, probably not reading this. I figured it was a well-read, obscure Keynesian blog criticizing Marx. That definitely looks like entryist trash.

Soc dems don't have to be "fascist entryists" to suck ass tbqh

Calling moderate parties "social fascist" merely served to make it more difficult to organize opposition to fascism in the 1930s.

...

This kills the leftcom.

Non-Marxist socialism be it anarchist or otherwise was always better than Marxism.
People like me are ahead of the game.

...

Do you any retards actually read anything ever? This is the future we should be building - it's Marx, but applied for the 21st century and the actual real world, not the hypothetical "ideal" utopia

Of course not, where the fuck do you think you are? This is a memeland, only moderately more literate than Holla Forums. If people here were reading, they wouldn't be here shitposting all day

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

it's socialism, only the author doesn't want to call it that (which is what we should be doing as marx said in 18th brumaire)

I see your point but Marxists still have the best explanation why capitalism is a fuck.

we should call it real capitalism™
or somehow rebrand marxism as real capitalism™
motherfuckers love real capitalism™ even if they don't know what it is

well it's not rebrading either
it's a planned economy, but not centrally, so the beraucratic class doesn't arise to replace the capitalists

oh it's le evil centralization that makes bureocrats appear out of nowhere, so lets turn everything into a fucking mess, all over again

So it's an another utopian anarchist book.

Always get uneasy when people post this guy because his political views broadly approximate my own but I take the view that I don't really care if Marx was right or not because Marxists basically have the right set of enemies, where he seems more willing to argue that Marxism is wrong. (As opposed to just too tome-y and incompatible with bourgeois politics to dedicate time to.)


While the way it's written has hints at a mild level of xenophobia that leaves a bad taste, it's basically correct to assert that mass immigration has been a bad thing.

Furthermore even if prosperity is built on third world exploitation, the degree to which that exploitation occurs can easily be mitigated by reductions in outsourcing and the free trade meme, and a push for developing countries to adopt import-substitution-industrialisation policies. Go even further with a clearing union that ensures balanced trade and you're laughing.


The primary reason the white working class hate the left in Britain, for example, is because of the association with neoliberal mass immigration. It then becomes necessary to emphasise on the contrary that you're antipathetic either way. Consider it "A third of the posts on this communist website are about worker co-ops under capitalism" because they just want to make the point that communism isn't social democratic railway nationalisation.

Aside from his statements "refuting" Marxist claims which seem misguided or wrong, he barely mentions the decline in the rate of profit.

thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/06/23/europes-crisis-the-cluj-debate-with-mark-blyth/

Marxist arguments that the falling rate of profit was responsible for stagflation in the 70s and the rise of neoliberalism, are a better empirical fit than post-Keynesian arguments about the balance of wages and employment.

How is an overall rate of profit even divined anyway?
Does it include banks, or only productive industry, transportation and retail?

It seems an interesting coincidence that around the time the rate of profit in the USA started to fall in the 1960s, private debt levels were also (iirc) passing 100% GDP, and that G20 profit levels fell so quickly after the 1973 oil crisis (which would ramp up everyone's costs but the banker's.). To memory there appears to be a reasonable inverse correlation with oil prices, but I'm too lazy to try and overlay two graphs.

Shit essay. It begins by pretending to look at actual theoretical aspects of communism, then spends 2/3ds of the essay taking about how Marxism supports open borders and islamic gommunism and so on. It's bait.

I'd be perfectly fine with an old-school socdem government, mind. I just would also be fine with ML.

thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/the-us-rate-of-profit-1948-2015/

Lotta technical stuff, but I gather that you measure it by comparing reported corporate profit rates and/or national output versus cost of fixed assets and employee compensation.

Why do people think that Marx's critique is invalid just because the LTV isn't picture perfect when applied to specific conditions? Most of the flaws found in it are regarding abstract calculations for production costs and profit margins.Yet in praxis, we see that his critique holds. Falling rate of profit, an always existing reserve labour army, crisis due to M-C-M elasticity and stock market speculation, reproduction of capital as a force in itself. Even the iron rule of wages seems to have made a comeback even though it seemed to be gone during the 50's and 60's.

both are correct analyses though

Keynesianism is unsustanaible

That guy is too young to be having that hair line. He'd be better off shaving his head.

Social democracy is fascism in casual clothing.

Wonder if people genuinely believe this or if it's just an excuse for a good old factional scrap.

Ironically but unironically coming to wonder if the entirety of politics is just an excuse for factional scraps with your own side with changing the world being a purely coincidental side effect. Like, nationalise something just to poke the eyes of the right-wingers in your own party, break a strike to drive the soft left up the wall, breathe to send the trots into a fit…

Post-war keynesian social democracy in rich countries borrowed a lot from interwar fascism.

In Brazil and Argentina, the local varieties of socdem are the offspring of their own homemade fascists (Vargas and Perón).

Oh, and I was referring to

Such as?

Protectionism, state-led development, class conciliation on a national level, etc.

Dunno man, see pic one and two

Please


And yet wages havent risen since the 70's.
It has always been on or over subsistence level, dumbfuck writer. If its below subsistence you fucking die, by the definition of subsistence.

HURRAAAAY MORE WORK. REJOICE WORKERS, DO THESE JOBS MOST OF YOU FEEL ARE MEANINGLESS OR FUCKING STARVE ISNT CAPITALISM GREAT PRAISE KEYNES

Economically illiterate and american as fuck. You benefitted from being the only undamaged industrialised capitalist nation in the world left after worldwar two while everything else was litterally bombed to shit. You also had vast amounts of untapped resources that european powers lacked.

Except he was litterally right about all of them.
< capitalism tends to increase the (1) accumulation, (2) concentration (accumulation over time) and (3) centralisation of capital. Capitalism will therefore have a tremendous tendency towards monopoly.
Check
< capitalism will tend to destroy more and more capitalists and result in huge centralisation of capital (or monopoly) and reduce even capitalists to the proletarian class;
Check
cont.

cont

Pretty much the only valid point this writer has.

Much more co-evolution than borrowing directly.
While there was protectionism, there was rarely a push to outright autarky on the level fascists aimed for. (Actually, the thwarted desire of Keynes himself was for balanced trade mediated by an international clearing union.), and class conciliation took the model of institutionalising antagonism instead of trying to dispel it as under fascism. (i.e. the state taking on a role as mediator between independent trade unionists and independent business, instead of creating it's own toothless trade union to retain the facade of worker participation.)

It would require a very charitable look at the aims of fascists and a very uncharitable look at the aims of postwar-consensus politicians to draw much more than loose comparisons.

OH wow.

The whole point this article hinges on is