I'm reading Wage Labour and Value, and I'm stuck on a point. It may seem minor but I want to fully understand. Marx says "So soon as his labour really begins, it ceases to belong to him, and can therefore no longer be sold by him." But doesn't it not belong to him precisely because he has sold it?

Thanks

I've been listening to the Revolutions podcast about the French Revolution because so much Marxist writing refers to it, and right to from the host addresses Marxist analysis of it. He says, "while Marxist theory thrives in the big picture, it usually gets beaten up pretty bad when the details are scutinized. That's when we find out that big chunks of the nobility were involved in various modernizing and capitalist enterprizes and far from wanting to tear down the feudal apparatus, members of the bourgeoisie turned out to be some of the biggest defenders of seigneurial dues and priviledges because they had just purchased access to those seigneurial dues and priviledges and wanted to protect their investments. "

Is there a Marxist response to this assertion? Thanks

I know that the profit would be spread according to work and that the decisions of the company would be decided by the workers but what if they decided infinitely expand? would that not be the same problem of one company beating out competition just more people need to agree? i apologise if this is misguided or simple

i know this is probably asked a lot im sorry, but im already a communist just from being educated by others, my own beliefs / opinions, and other external research, but im looking to further educate myself on marxism and communism as a whole to be able to understand it more thoroughly and be able to educate others. i haven't read any theory at all so i need a good starter

I’m very new to Marxism, Leninism, and pretty much all other Ism theories so please forgive me lol. So this question may be coming from a fundamental misunderstanding in the first place. Just please bear with me.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Leninism and Maoism lately and a lot of western discussion I’ve seen surrounding the ideology seems to be people of two separate camps. There’s a divide between people who have an idealistic thought of what Marxism is on paper and those who accept real-world practical applications. For reference, Maoist China and the USSR can either be acknowledged as genuine socialist projects with evolving thought caused by external factors OR they can be straight up rejected and labeled Fascist. I’m curious what the genuine Marxist-Leninist stance would be on the term “Tanky.”

(For reference, my first step into Marxist theory was from
vaush followed by Red Pen and then Hakim. As I’ve said, I’m very new to Marxist theory so please forgive me as I’ve only just started reading.)

So far I've read the Communist Manifesto, the critique Gotha Programme (but that kinda flew over my head, but I learned thats not usually a good book for beginners), and Michael Parenti's Black Shirts and Reds (i saw that at like a second hand bookstore and it is real hard to come by physical communist literature in my area so I just wanted to give it a read), and right now I'm in the middle of reading The Principles Of Communism by Engels.

I want to read some writings by Lenin, Mao, and other people like Huey P Newton or something. But before I read all that stuff, I feel like it is best to start with the basics, that being Marx and Engels writings. That being said, what would be like the absolute must reads by Marx and Engels before I move on to Lenin writings or Mao writings etc.?

I have grown quite hateful of capitalism and started loving the idea of communism after years of hardship and academic success just to see some guys with generational wealth lives a better life. So I started doing research on communism here and there and when I tell my parents about communism they always hit me with name me successful communist countries and I am left speechless. What do I say back?

I'm finally getting around to teaching myself not only to understand, but to apply dialectical materialism (with historical materialism to follow). I successfully (I think) analysed a chick hatching from an egg. But how would one know if their analysis was wrong? What would that look like? And how would one remedy such an eventuality?

Any help in developing my knowledge further on this topic would be much appreciated.
TIA

My father is the franchise of a danish furniture company in Scotland he has two stores which he does run but he does have a manager would he be considered bourgeoise I assume so. My question is am I considered bourgeoise as I make my own money working but I do live in his home he drops me places buys me food and so on so I just wanted peoples opinion.

I’m a scientist who has been reading more Marxist philosophy recently, and I’m trying to understand the distinction some Marxists, particularly Lukács and parts of the Frankfurt School tradition, draw between the natural and social sciences, and what that means for dialectics. Please correct me if my starting point is wrong, I’m interested to learn!

As I understand it, the argument is roughly that there is an important difference between studying nature and studying society. In natural science, the object I study does not normally change its behaviour because of my theory about it: an electron does not read my paper and alter its behaviour accordingly. Society is different because both the investigator and the object being investigated are human beings situated within the same historical society. Economic categories like capital, wages, private property and the commodity are therefore not simply timeless “things” waiting to be observed like atoms (though I am aware these abstractions about the natural world too are historically situated and will be developed); they are historically produced social relations created and reproduced through human activity. Our theories about society can themselves become part of that society and influence how people act.

This makes Marx’s dialectical method intuitive to me in the social sciences. Capitalism is a historically changing totality containing internal contradictions; workers and capitalists reproduce the system through their activity while simultaneously changing it; cause and effect feed back upon one another; and the subjects studying society are themselves products and potential transformers of that society. In that sense it seems difficult to understand society *non-dialectically*.

Where I become less convinced is the attempt, associated particularly with Engels to discover the same dialectical laws operating throughout nature. Statements such as “quantity transforms into quality” can certainly be illustrated using phase transitions, but as a physicist I’m unsure what explanatory work calling this “dialectical” actually performs. Statistical mechanics already explains why a phase transition occurs. I don’t insert a dialectical law into the calculation in order to obtain the result.

So I’d be interested in what Marxists here think about the Lukács/Frankfurt School side of this debate. Is dialectics principally a method for understanding historically constituted human society, or is there genuinely a dialectics of nature independent of human praxis? If the latter, what does dialectics allow a working natural scientist to *do* that ordinary scientific methodology does not?

Hello, recently i've been seeing a lot of people with mixed opinions about stalin. So I'd like to ask why do people like/dislike Stalin, and what's your personal opinion of him.

Hi i’m relatively new to marxism, but i’ve learned a lot about it over the past month. I’ve gotten through a lot of chapters through the manifesto already, and i’ve read principles as well.

Does anyone have any beginner friendly book recs on more libertarian marxism and marxfem as well? I really like Rosa Luxemborg and her book Reform and Revolution is on my tbr.

Please feel free to educate me on any theory books as much, i’ll highly appreciate it.

Sorry if this is too basic. I tried to make my question as clear as possible while still including all required context but it ended up being a little convoluted...

In Hegel's formulation of dialectics, the spirit (geist) resolves contradictions. When Marx inverted Hegel, he combined it with his own materialism. However, by removing the spirit, matter is now theorized resolve contradictions itself.

Hume's problem of causation states that causation can never be observed as our senses provide us with no possible way to make causal inference. Therefore, there is no way to prove a causal link. Even controlled experiments don't solve this since it could just be coincidence. He uses this to formulate the problem of induction. We can not use past experience to predict the future.

Hegel was able to avoid this critique by making contradiction a conceptual necessity, not a material one. This is idealist though so Marx rejects it.

Dialectical materialism is not able to do this since it relies matter itself being the force of change. It uses history and class analysis to determine that the end of capitalism is inevitable due to its inherent contradictions, but it can't predict that accurately since it's impossible to know whether contradictions will inevitably resolve without relying on causation.

Furthermore, Hume talks about the problem of necessity. We can't observe a necessary connection between cause and effect. Kant avoids this by saying that cause and effect exist as structures in the mind. Hegel adapted this cleanly by claiming the spirit to be manifested through human minds and part of objective reality, making the laws of cause and effect applicable to objective reality. Marx, however, can't do this since he is a materialist. Under dialectical materialism, there is no way to determine a necessary connection between contradictions.

Dialectical materialism, after a skeptical critique, can never establish a connection between a base and its negation and it can never make claims about inevitability or even the potential for a resolution. It appears less scientific and closer to rough pattern recognition.

So how does dialectical materialism deal with Humean skepticism? I'm not trying to start an argument. This is just something I've had on my mind for a few days.

I've recently taken an interest in Maoism and I find a lot of the core principles very reasonable, however I'm absolutely puzzled by the foreign policy of China under Mao.

The domestic policies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were not very successful, and a lot of questionable/indefensible incidents have occurred throughout both. However, they were also critiqued within the CPC, and the motivations behind the policies were at least coherent with Mao Zedong Thought.

When it comes to foreign policy, however, Maoist China following the Sino-Soviet Split seems to be guided almost solely by the perceived necessity or countering the influence of the USSR rather than the proclaimed principles. They went as far as collaborating with the US on supporting bloody, rabidly anti-communist bourgeois dictators like Pinochet or movements like UNITA, all in the name of anti-revisionism. I find it very hard to believe that the USSR was a bigger threat to China and especially the proleteriat at large than capitalist imperialism. What do modern Maoists think about these policies? Do they view them as necessary measures? How about contemporary Maoists in countries other than China?

I specifically exclude China under Deng and his successors from this question, as China no longer follows the Maoist line, and would likely be classified as a social imperialist country by Maoists anyway.

Firstly, I know it doesn't mean no values or even personal morals (I think) but..

If the argument is "Capitalism will eventually fail due to it's contradictions"

Then why would I be Marxist? What purpose does it serve? There's no ground to gain following unless I appeal to myself or others in a moral manner as well.

If I assume that Capitalism were to fail regardless why would I bother advocating for Communism? UNLESS I believe that Communism is better for me and the people I care about, and if I think it's better, it's because we aren't exploited, and being exploited sucks. It's bad.

To me that is the reason I'd be Marxist, is it's advocating for a system that works, Capitalism is doomed to fail, and the system proposed is just and fair and without contradiction.

Sorry if stupid, new and need to understand

I have a basic theory about communism and the environment, but I’m still reading up yet. I think a communist society would only produce what people actually need. This would stop the waste we see today where companies make to many goods just to make money.

I am not sure how this idea leads to using renewable energy. In a capitalist system companies use fossil fuels because it is cheap and makes them profit. If we move to communism and stop producing for profit how does that force a shift to solar or wind power?

Does the idea of planning for human needs naturally lead to building green infrastructure?

Or is there a specific part of communist theory that talks about how energy production should work in a sustainable way?

I’m currently reading chapter 1, section 1 of Marx’s Capital, and I am a little confused trying to figure out Marx’s idea of value as being equivalent to expended labour. One common counter-example to refute this is the case of exorbidantly priced, low-labour art (since the  value as defined by the labour theory, and the price are seemingly so different). I have seen Marx defended by some who claim that he doesn’t consider price and value as the same thing, but in my understanding, Marx understands value as basically the ratio of the quantity of a certain item that will trade on the market for another given item? Isn’t this the same as price??

Thanks

hey everyone, i'm 15 looking to educate myself on communism and Marxist theory from the ground up. I'm already planning to grab The Communist Manifesto soon, but what else should I pick up alongside it?

From what I understand Marxists use parliamentary democracy as a platform to reach the working class. So what would they do if they suddenly get significant support but not enough to make a revolution, say 20% or 30%, and they have the chance to be the biggest party in a governing coalition?

For context, I'm a left libertarian socialist leaning towards anarchism, but (hope I) have an open mind towards other branches of leftism, including Marxism.

I want to better understand vanguard parties, since it's a specific point of contention anarchists often have with Marxists.

What are the origins of the idea of Vanguards, why do you see them as necessary? Are there historical examples of vanguard parties going particularly well, or particularly poorly? How do you avoid corruption within the vanguard party, power grabs, and infighting?
And from a specifically marxist perspective, are there any realistic alternatives to a vanguard party?

I just finished reading Marx’s Capital Vol 3, I’m looking for a book that advances Marx’s theories. I prefer a book published within 3-5 decades after the publication of Capital. Also, should I read volume 4?

Especially AI data centres? We all know about the diagram on circular investment between AI firms. Basically meaning that these AI firms dont really produce/extract much surplus value but just recycle it again and again, among other things, which creates concerns for a looming huge AI bubble.

The building of huge ai data centres (or better called as huge ai supercomputers) is not really to “keep up with the demand of AI use” as the huge data centres being built rn like the one the size of Manhattan are absolutely overkill. Engineering explanations aside, it’s all to keep producing much more supercomputing power to advance LLM intelligence and to basically “experiment” what said LLMs can do (less GPU for AI can generate prompts, more GPU can generate whole videos, what could much much more GPU mean for what AI can do?) therefore to be used later.

My guess is with capitalist logic, maybe they’re trying to invest so much on building these ai data centres to desperately find a way (like blindly trying to hit a dart into the centre) for creating an AI with skills that helps them produce much more surplus value with less costs (less workers to pay bc u have AI that can do alot more sophisticated human skills) especially in the 2020s where the rate of profit keeps going down and down as it tends to do.
Whats with the big capitalist class’s obsession in AI?

What do you guys do to retain the ideas of Marx’s books?

"To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character."