Proudhon

I'm thinking no. Although, one of my old professors seemed to think that it was a mark of development on Marx's part - it showed some deeper grasp of political economy and Ricardo's work in particular that was missing in his earlier writings.

There are some similarities between Marx's Capital and System of Economic Contradictions. Rene Berthier wrote about some of them. And I think Iain McKay as well. But it's not clear really if Marx was "secretly" influenced by it all that much. He probably really hated it. Plus apparently in the untranslated second half of the book, Proudhon attempts to synthesize Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel - and by his own admission, Proudhon had not read Hegel… so who knows how Marx would have reacted to that part.

The young Marx really liked "What is Property?" though.

Marx thought credit was a stage of capitalism which was wrong. Name something in Proudhons doctrine that was not correct

It sounds like your mixing up Luxemburg and Marx

So Luxemburg was a revisionist?

Engels was the good type of class traitor

She was wrong theoretically, yes. A revisionist is someone who abandons the revolutionary thrust of Marxism in favor of reformist conciliation towards capitalism.

I consider Luxemburg a fine revolutionary who was very, very wrong about important matters of Marxist theory. Kautsky probably knew more Marxist theory than almost anyone in Europe but he betrayed the socialist cause. That’s the difference imo

There were things that Kautsky predicted using Marxist theory that neither his contemporaries, nor Marxist today have had a deep enough knowledge to perceive. For instance, he predicted that once the gold boom of the 1890s was over that there would be an apocalyptic crisis in the capitalist countries. Few Marxist thinkers, even great revolutionaries and theorists alike, have perceived the intimate connection between the supply and price of gold and the Great Depression and Depressions since. Kautsky was certainly right that the gold boom had created the rising costs of living prior WWI whereas Lenin preferred the monopoly explanation. Truth be told they were both right but I think Kautsky’s explanation came closer to the root of the problem and also goes to show why the ideologists of monopoly capital are so deathly afraid of deflation.

The argument is more substantive than the identity of the person making it. Engels was a socialist despite being bourgeois. Jefferson wanted to outlaw slavery despite being a slaveowner.
It's counterintuitive at first glance, but it doesn't go any further than that.

so what did marx think about credit?

He thought that usury was a primitive form of capital that rarely had a revolutionary effect on society, it parasitized pre-capitalist social formations and typically ruined them in a reactionary way.

e.g. feudal landlords fell into debt to Jewish usurer’s and the lords would turn around and exploit the peasants harder to pay their bills. The peasants being unable to make the payments demanded by the lords might take loans from the local usurer’s until they hit a breaking point and rise up. At the end there might be a unity of interest between the peasantry and landlords in destroying the usurer’s but society essentially returned to the way it was. Sometimes lords and kings simply killed their creditors.

Because usury had a tendency to disturb pre-capitalist modes of production that is one reason why it is restricted/prohibited in most pre-capitalist formations.

Marx says the rise of banks and public debt are simultaneously the most advanced expression of the capitalist system and its most artificial product. Banks and public debt were the products of bourgeois republican institutions whereas usurer’s lived on the margins of feudal society and their prospects declined with the rise of the modern financial system as they are dependent on high-interest rates.

The establishment of national banks reflects the demand of industrial and mercantile capitalists that usury be controlled that money be made available to carry on capitalist production rather than simply making money from money.

Interest rates start being determined traditional of a given society towards capitalism, in post-Roman Europe this baseline interest rate starts at around 8%. Under the modern capitalist system the interest rate is the baseline rate of profit but also serves as a limit on the rate of profit. The profit of enterprise is typically formulated as profit minus the rate of interest. Meaning industrial capitalists must earn higher profits on their production than the rate of interest or their money would be better off invested in some bond or high-interest bank account somewhere.

During a crisis the interest rate rises unless it’s kept down artidicially. These high interest rates incentivize capitalists to put money back into the system which eventually lowers the interest rate to a level below its pre-crisis rate. Over the past 200 years capitalism has slowly but surely lowered the rate of interest and tilted things in favor of the non-financial capitalists.

Marx wrote that if the rate of interest ever exceeded the rate of profit that the industrial capitalists would transform themselves into financial capitalists. This actually happened in the 1980s with the Volcker Shock tho in Marx’s time it was purely theoretical. His prediction that the sheer mass of capital would push down interest rates to an even lower point was accurate. He also countered fearmongering that the exponential nature of debt would cause all social surplus to end up in the hands of bankers and financial rentiers by pointing out that for capitalist society to continue these debts would be cleared by bankruptcy, crisis, and falling interest rates.

This. He is really only valuable for understanding the historical development of these theories.

He also thought it would become less and less important which turned out to be a very wrong prediction.

What is Property? is still a very good book on the various concepts of property.

It has in a way. You have to have quite a lot of capital to get any major benefit from the financial system rn with the way interest rates are. Of course, the banks and financial system are still very important he never said they’d become obsolete they are the quintessential product of modern capitalism in his words.

Most of the modern lords of finance like Soros, Buffet et. al are products of the Volcker shock whose wealth kept exploding with the 90s and early 2000s stock boom. If governments across the world hadn’t bailed them out (which Marx warned against) they would be far less powerful and wealthy than they are today.

Someone like Soros or Buffet doesn’t merely lend money but they invest in/against tangible assets in the stock markets. Real companies and real properties tend to outperform bonds, loans etc. given the low rate of interest and constant yearly inflation associated with modern industrial economies who are largely still as influenced by Keynes as by say Hayek.

what a good poster

why do people shit on bakunin all the time? he was a much bolder and more practical left-anarchist than baby-tier utopian ant-communism aristocrat Kropotkin.

Because they never read him and think he must have been mentally deficient to ever oppose the infallible Karl Marx (pbuh).

I begin to think this more and more, invisible dictatorship actually makes a whole load of practical sense. Even though it's totally authoritarian but then so is a revolution

it's literally the anarchist equivalent of a revolutionary vanguard

His writing isn't as clear or complete and he feuded with Marx. They should both be read, Kroptokin mostly for a btfo of muh human nature.

So something else anarchists figured out decades before marxists. :^)

This
Hindsight proved him right times and times again, yet no one noticed because nobody reads him

Mutualism is more socialist than Marxism-Leninism.

Pretty much everything is more socialist than Marxism-Leninism.

C'est le vol!