Big Tech Doesn't Want You to Know This About Marx
Big Tech Doesn't Want You to Know This About Marx
12 comments
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Mark's had a lot of emotional ideas with almost no mathematical theories that could be proven or consistently relied upon. It's all "this feels like it should be right" and no calculations. He got a lot right about how people feel, but a lot wrong about how policy will accurately affect economies.
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Famously, Das Kapital starts with "dear diary, today i feel very sad and I wish I didn't feel sad. Kisses, Mark"
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Good bait, but writing Mark's was a step too far. You flew too close to the sun, mate.
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I see I failed here. Damn that autocorrect. But I will take the consequences of my failure. My shame is bitter. (Yes I'm talking out of my ass here, but not in my criticism of Marx) Give me a mathematical equation or economic law proposed by Marx. Not a stump speech, but something that uses math that can be proven or disproven.
For example, ROI on government investment (which includes tax cuts) can be calculated quite accurately. Anything under a 1.0 is a loss. The projected ROI can be checked with the final ROI and economists propose theories as to why it was incorrect using new mathematical models that then have to be proven or disproven. I don't remember seeing anything like that in Marx's work. His was all stump speech that evokes strong feelings of camaraderie and unification. But I am always open to learning. Provide me the math he proposed and its results (the accuracy of those predictions). Not just ideas.
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Oh man people, stop falling for the bait! This is basic stuff! Like come on, this guy is talking like ROI is some hard concept, clearly nothing you say will not go over his head.
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Not everything you disagree with is click bait. This is Lemmy for hells sake. It's not like I'm hiring myself out for a dozen clicks.
This is conversation. I have seen some really good responses, and some not so much.
ROI can be calculated to a fairly high accuracy in almost every instance. That is one that is definitely not a soft idea. Pick up a textbook.
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I don't need to know anything except that you didn't answer any of the other people giving you actual stuff, just me calling you out.
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Let that be a lesson to you.
I was busy man. It's my days off. I have a lot of time to reddit/Lemmy at irregular intervals with work (layovers, waiting for work to show up). But when in home, I'm home. Plus I broke my screen and had to get that fixed today. Such a pain.
Lastly, everyone else either gave links to things to read, which is useful information but not something to debate about until after familiarizing myself with them. Which I did respond to one of those, iirc. Asking about the resulting efficacy of those theories and calculations. No response there as well.
My point is that ideology has no place in economics. Just what works and what doesn't based on results. For example, out current tax structure means heavily on shifting taxation from the wealthy to the low earners. That has fairly consistently failed to produce anything other than market instability and poverty. Same with our lack of education funding. And crumbling infrastructure. All things that economists (who are almost exclusively capitalism leaning) have been screaming would happen since the Regan days. From my limited knowledge, Marx's theories failed to produce the results they promised to produce. Meaning that when calculating the projected ROI (for example) it was unable to predict the outcomes reliably, while other theories were able to predict those outcomes much more consistently.
Anyway cheers.
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I don't remember seeing anything like that in Marx's work
lol you haven't even opened capital, have you?
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For fuck's sake read something other than the Manifesto.
Marx wrote 2 and a half volumes of what was at the time the most up to date state of classical economic theory, incorporating all of the previous theories of classical economy, and providing further real world scientific economic evidence (with what was available at the time) for theories that had been previously established. Literally, his economic proof for the labor theory of value is literally just providing concrete evidence for what was at the time Adam Smith's labor theory of value, responding to the emerging neo-classical liberal theorists that sought to obscure the insights of the foundational works of Smith and Ricardo, the neo-classicals have just convinced you that it was Marx's because Marx=bad/dangerous. Marx was literally the first person to do this kind of in-depth non-vibes based political-economic analysis and it is because of this he was recognized as a genius by others who didn't seek to obscure the economic relationship between labor and capital.
His activism and agitation was driven by his belief in the scientific progression of socialism, that capitalism can either progress towards socialism and empower and free the productive class or it will stagnate to barbarism and simply enrich the ownership class of whom the classical mechanisms of the market that drive production will break down into a monopoly and renters economy, stagnating production and growth, based on the very economic mechanisms that were first elucidated by Smith, and then expanded on by Ricardo and Marx.
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this criticism "feels" like something someone who's never actually read Marx might think sounds right, but very quickly falls apart when you start reading Capital and realize that he's responding to liberal economists of his time with very specific critiques by working through their own economic logic, and yes, using real world examples to illustrate his points
maybe you're confused because you mistakenly believe Marx invented communism and wanted everyone to share the same toothbrush, when in reality the bulk of his economic writing is spent analyzing and critiquing the foundational assumptions of capitalist production and exchange
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12 comments