<I pay for the machines

ty for reading list, saved, fug

Ironic porky posting can be healthy

Clearly not well enough to know that Sanders is a social democrat and not a democratic socialist.
If you'd bothered to read Capital you'd know.

I'm going to have my lunch now, but put simply Capital is self-expanding value, value in motion. It is "self expanding" in that it produces a surplus which can be reinvested into the means of production. A capitalist acts as the conscious facilitator of this expansion (or, as it is known in Marxian economics, "accumulation") by investing his accrued surplus-value in MoP and Labour Power. To call it "self-expanding" value is to contrast it with the simple M-C-M movement, for it is qualitatively no different to the M-C-M' movement of capitalist production and sale. Accumulation can then be described as M-C-M'-C'-M' '-C' '-M' ' ' and so on.

I did miss out some info from Vol. 2 and 3 which fits bonds and stocks into the acceleration of this accumulation, but that would needlessly complicate things.

I appreciate the explanation, but I get how that works. I don't get why it's a bad thing, though. Personifying and commodifying the concept of value is pretty useless and meaninglessly abstract. Value is different for every transaction based on the interests of the parties. You're basically saying that as soon as someone starts to make a profit off of trading, that SOMETHING interventionalist should happen.

Surplus-value is by definition extracted via exploitation, and the natural Capitalist movement toward greater exploitation simultaneous with decreased relative demand for labour-power leads to unemployment, poverty, "pauperism", and misery for the great mass of people. This occurs because of the natural tendency for labour power to decline in value with increased productiveness, the relative surplus population acting as a dead weight on the worker, the desire to keep the price of variable Capital as low as is feasibly possible, and the position of the labourer as an individual with no commodity but his labour-power.

Westerners are lucky in that curbs have been placed on these natural laws of capitalism thanks to democratic struggle, but in the third world these curbs do not exist and thus we have child labour, low wages, and desperate poverty. This is what Marxists call "imperialism"; Lenin's accessible work on the topic is worthwhile, and for a modern take see David Harvey's book.

The Marxist conception of value uses the class process as its entry point, and only "personifies" value insofar as it recognises it as a social substance with no existence independent of the relations between free commodity traders. That is, value is not inherent to a commodity unless it is seen as useful and is traded with the owner of another commodity (in the Capitalist system, money becomes the sole socially acceptable manifestation of Value).

Any explanation I give is going to be piecemeal, and I really have to get going because I'm supposed to be meeting someone for lunch. So if you want to get to grips with this conception of economics, I'm afraid there really is no other way than picking up either the three volumes of Capital itself, or Harvey's far shorter, modernised books on it (mainly "Enigma of Capital", "Seventeen Contradictions", and "Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason"). Capital doesn't take into account some important modern developments, like imperialism and the minimum wage in the West, and others it naturally spends less time on (service economies weren't really a major force in Marx's day, so while he does discuss services, they feature a less prominent role than manufacture), so you may want to go with Harvey if you find reading 3,000 pages of political economics you may not even agree with a little too much.

There are other seminal works like "Finance Capital", "Imperialism", and "Capitalist Accumulation" that are good to read after Capital, and the leftypol reading list should have others too.

Also, there are other modern critiques of Capitalism other than David Harvey's; Anwar Shaikh's monster of a book "Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises" is worth reading, though not explicitly Marxist, it is certainly in line with Marxist critiques, and in fact touches on Marx (and others working in the Classical tradition), although it does presuppose a solid understanding of orthodox, Keynesian, and post-Keynesian economics, so isn't really an introduction in any sense of the word. Harvey is way more accessible, but if you're good with maths and economic terminology, Shaikh's book is a good read, though quite dense.

By the way, before I go, remember that Marxist critiques should never be moralistic, they should be based on an analysis of the contradictions, inefficiencies, and the immense waste of human labour power and intelligence that is a product of the general laws of capitalist production.

If anyone mentions "fairness" or some other moral judgement as an argument for communism, they likely haven't read any literature in this tradition.

Wonderful post.
This interpretation of "surplus value" says that the reinvestment of capital in the means of production is somehow immoral and implies that there is some way to achieve the alternative. How do you direct the distribution of energy from an energy company and how are the workers fed? Who decides how to moderate this system of making sure that nothing stemming from the labor of people ends up in the pockets of cronies? This is where it would be important to distinguish between anarchocommunism and totalitarian communism.
I agree that it is a tendency of capitalism to exploit, in a non-pejorative sense, advantages in the market. However, I do not see how a growing capitalist economy contributes to a lack of demand for labor power. It definitely places corporations in a position of power where they can extort entire classes. But this is why regulation is such a nuanced and important issue.
I nearly completely agree. However, the basic point is that capitalism allows a nation-state to accomplish things it would otherwise never be able to. The society must be enlightened and actually participate in the governing process. I advocate for incremental changes that lift up the poor and still allow for others to move freely through the market as they see fit. Can't we solve classism without a complete overhaul?
I agree completely, except for that this type of ascription of value extends to every decision a human being makes. I don't believe that you can put economics in the type of box that Marxism says it should be in.
But hell yeah man, I'll check out Harvey. I have to finish Callahan first, but I'll be back here sooner or later.

All politics should be rational and not influenced by emotion. I won't jump on the point right now since I haven't consumed more than the basic Marx, but no one's ideology is immune from logical, rational, and moral/ideological critique. Is that statement more a result of capitalism's or communism's immorality?

You cannot have capitalism without class.
The issues of any class system cannot be solved while that system still exists.
Slave society, feudalism, capitalism…
The issue is twofold, the issues inherent in capitalism and the issue of class itself.