Is he wrong?

Toppest of kek. This is one howler after another.

I think it's more that he was writing in contrast to utopian socialists rather than running out of ideas.

Ok.

Are you implying that the socialist experiments of the 20th century existed in a vacuum where the rest of the capitalist world didn't work to see it fail?

Hardly. But that is the test that every state faces: whether it is a centrist dictatorship, a Socialist state, a Shia Theocracy, or an oligarchical Republic doesn't matter, if a state cannot survive the test of international geopolitics then it doesn't matter what its architects aspired to.

I love that this argument assumes that the initial contribution can't be measured and compensated for. But instead suggests that the initial investment actually justifies perpetual exploitation as compensation.

… Did he read anything beside the Manifesto? Even Marx himself insisted that the Manifesto was flawed and outdated as early as the 1860s. It's very far from being the "definitive" work of Marx so many people seem to assume it is, and anyone whose research went beyond skimming though Wikipedia articles for a few hours would clearly know that.

Nobody says that the organization of the means of production or the conception of a product isn't labour, the proletariat isn't just a synonym for "blue-collar workers"; rather it is one of many forms of labour and we see no reason why those that happen to own these means of production should rack up all the profits. Besides, the organization of the means of production or the conception of a product are mostly managed not by business owners but by (mostly white-collar) employees: analysts, advisers, designers, researchers, programmers, etc.

The " Primitive Communism - Slavery - Feudalism - Capitalism - Socialism - Communism " isn't an immutable model every society on the globe is supposed to strictly follow. It is what Marx analyzed as being the historical trend in Western Europe, not a plan he devised to be some sort of universal blueprint.

yeah

propietors are the ones behind the organization,a llocation and so on because they have gained the power to do so, not because they are special

anyone can do their job with enough knowledge and experience, just like manual labour

Going on about the organization of some sort of future dream society is called "utopian socialism", and Marx specifically avoided this. Marx's main focus was criticism of capitalism with the intention of this critique serving as guidelines for the creation of a system that would replace capitalism, but he made a point of never saying what socialism or communism "should" be.

No it doesn't.

In the Manifesto, which OP implies he read, Marx explicitly refers to doctors, intellectuals, etc. as being pushed into the ranks of the proletariat by the dynamics of capitalism.

Regarding administrative / organisational work: Marxists don't deny that this is to some degree necessary. The point is that a) much of this labour is only necessary due to and for the maintenance of the relationship of exploitation b) performing mental labour should not give one a muh privileged position over those performing physical labour and c) there should be a more equitable division of mental and physical labour.

Read Marx (or Lenin or Braverman) instead of Wikipedia pages.

Also ironic to note that I often hear the "it's not real work unless you are in a coal mine" line from anti-Marxists who claim Marx never worked a day in his life.

You can't "ignore" something that did not yet exist in your lifetime. Besides, pension funds are still controlled by financiers, and plundered and manipulated for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. Besides, what does that have to do with the vast majority of capital which is not owned as part of pension funds?

Clearly he doesn't understand (possibly not even read) Hegel's dialectics, or else he wouldn't conflate it with Marx.

Closest thing to a valid criticism but still retarded. Marx perhaps did not anticipate the amount of concessions the 20th century labour movement could extract from the capitalist class, but his point should not be read in terms of absolute immiseration. Wealth is a social relation, and the past 40+ years have seen inequality soar, meaning that the working class is poorer in relation to its masters than ever before. Plus, OP is wilfully ignoring the actually existing poverty today that is largely whitewashed by manipulating definitions and measurements, not to mention the regular economic downturns that do genuinely impoverish vast swathes of the proletariat.

4/10 made me reply.

dialectics is the marxist version of meme magic

His criticism of DiaMat is common and seems pretty valid, but I haven't read enough Marxist and anti-Marxist perspectives on the Dialectic to have an informed opinion.

The argument about "mission-critical efforts" because capitalists, particularly of particularly large enterprises, rarely engage in any kind of effort to maintain their business. Individuals like Mitt Romney quite literally do nothing, instead collecting revenue from their shares of various corporations whose management they play no role in. Smaller enterprises may often involve capitalists performing labor, but that doesn't excuse exploitation via surplus value extraction. There's no reason why management of a firm must be paired with private ownership of that firm. Divorcing management and ownership is actually very useful, providing better wages for the workers and preventing company policies that place profit above the well-being of the worker.

it's shit

This. Tho I dont despise Hegel, reading his political philosophy literally instead of through a "sexy hegel" conscious dilution is pretty delusional.

And yeah considering Marxism is just a materialist reinterpretation of Hegel's spiritual geist it makes perfect sense that it resembles a religion in many ways and should be critiqued for that. Marxism is not the beginning or the end of socialism and should not be treated as such.

"Assembly line medicine" is something one of my coworkers was telling me about the other day.

Most liberals don't even know what a bourgeois is. They think it's any person with money.

Doesn't help that discussion of class is dominated by the upper class/middle class/working class paradigm, which is based solely on income rather than labor relations.

Agreed, I hate hegel too desu

Yeah, there's nothing special about STEMfags that make them immune to proletarianisation.

He makes a few mistakes.

Capitalists don't ever get paid for their organizational labor. Consider what happens if they simply pay someone else to organize a company for them. Oh wait, that's a manager. Who gets paid in wages. Which is included in V (and that's not even hard to point out in Capital). The capitalist's relation to his own business can be purely expressed as a monetary relation and nothing more, and this is something that empirically happens.

LTV is an analysis of how commodities on a competitive free market are profitable, and not a whole lot more. Anything else that can be extracted from it in terms of analysis of goods production is just as easily done by analysis of sheer labor-time directly.

The US most certainly had slavery before it had feudalism. It's just most people don't realize that "sharecropping" is literally just feudalism's serf-lord relationship re-expressed. There's plenty of people who make serious points that the eastern bloc wasn't socialist at all (because, despite how much this triggers the "marxist," these places still have >>>commodity production

>There's plenty of people who make serious points that the eastern bloc wasn't socialist at all (because, despite how much this triggers the "marxist," these places still have >>>commodity production

How does that disprove commodity production?

Seems to be the current preoccupation with communists these days.

Daily reminder that a productive critique of Marx can only come from post-keynesian theory, everything from the right (especially the "libertarian" right) is just uninformed ideology.

Haven't read it but from the description it seems to be raising questions about what "constitutes an emancipated society". It doesn't look like it proposes a blueprint for a future world, though.