holy fuck, r/neoliberal just disproved communism, shut this site down

culturally underdeveloped people

Well that's certainly a phrase that is in no way racist

what's all this nazism doing in my anticommunism?
when your culture is rotten to the core, it would certainly seem that other cultures are uhh unripened

One failed product clearly disproves everything Marx ever wrote, communism has never been more finished
Gotta love showing an example of how capitalism failed means communism didn't work lmao. Yeah there might be people starving and juiceros being created and failing but that definitely doesn't have to do with the distribution of goods based on profit instead of need. Nope.
Marxism is a way to view the world that has like 7 books written on it
when you definitely understand the left
- The average leftist forum debate is at least 7 books equivalent if not more. And it’ll be on something inconsequential
marxism, famous for not having a veritable library of work
This person pulls a bait and switch in the worst way. They mention the failures of socialist economies, then goes on to describe the Juicero, which as a failure of the excesses of venture capital.
In fact if I remember right, a Chinese company copied the design of the Juicero, scrapped the useless parts like the QR reader and the wifi, and sold it for less than $100. They probably made a profit. Chalk up a win for socialism I guess.

Are these people really that ignorant?

LMFAO these people think gold and diamonds just spawn on the surface like Monster Hunter resource gathering points and all you have to do is pick them up
what is mining? sounds like Tankie Misinformation to me lol
Those people are deeply unserious
- You have to say "those people are deeply unserious in minecraft" or it is a call to violence
- A tweet that absolutely lives rent free in my head
I wonder if there’s some sort of monopoly on diamonds artificially inflating their price. Does Marx talk about supply/demand and explain that this can alter prices but not value? I wonder.
Anyways, this person thinking it takes no time/effort to “produce” diamonds/gold is funny (esp. with the case of lab diamonds).
Marx does talk about precious/luxury goods in Capital volume 1 actually. If I remember right he specifically talks about pearls and paintings. But if I remember right he doesn't define paintings as commodities, since their value can't be reproduced through the same methods, since the value comes from the rarity associated with the artist. He says something similar about pearls too.
But that poster is completely wrong. Gold doesn't take labor to mine out of the ground? Diamonds don't take labor to mine or synthesize? What
- Literally in the first chapter of Capital Volume 1:
  "Jacob doubts whether gold has ever been paid for at its full value. This applies still more to diamonds. According to Eschwege, the total produce of the Brazilian diamond mines for the eighty years, ending in 1823, had not realised the price of one-and-a-half years’ average produce of the sugar and coffee plantations of the same country, although the diamonds cost much more labour, and therefore represented more value. With richer mines, the same quantity of labour would embody itself in more diamonds, and their value would fall. If we could succeed at a small expenditure of labour, in converting carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks."
Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.
Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme
It feels like a weird joke. Like this is how I would do a parody of someone who refuses to read Capital. I'd make statements exactly like this, mentioning things that Marx explicitly mentioned in the first chapter as a joke.

Progressive left's worldview can be roughly summarized as "America bad, capitalism bad". It's barely any more nuanced than the GOP electorate, whose entire philosophy seems to be "Trump good, own the libs".

Heh, my ideology is so much more complex. See, I believe socialism bad, white capitalist countries good.

America bad, capitalism bad
This would make you have a correct opinion 95% of the time.
Painful amounts of projection.
Neoliberals have zero nuance. If something is designated as an enemy by the state department, everything it does in every situation is bad, and everything negative someone says about it must be true. But it's the people who think it's more complicated who just don't see nuance.
: "My house is on fire! What should we do?!"
Commie: "Spray water on it!"
Fascist: "Spray gasoline on it!"
: "Their plans are both equally simple. Clearly they both are wrong!"
- Neoliberals will note that, in the event of a grease fire, spraying water is actually bad. And they will use this as a point of evidence in their "Why we should defund the fire department" master's thesis.
Heh, my ideology is so much more complex.
Sort of the joke of neoliberalism. If you put out a 20,000 page white paper with the title "Socialism Bad, White Country Good" then you are correct, right up until someone issues a 21,000 page white paper that reads "DEBUNKED: Why White Country Sometimes Bad, but Socialism Even Worse Than Originally Thought".
Not surprising how many of these chucklefucks think AI is going to be a game-changer. After all, with a ChatBot I can produce white papers of infinite length! Try and refute that, stupid leftists. You can't!
Geocentrism is more complex than heliocentrism (at least in terms of things like orbital mechanics), and yet...
It's like these people have never heard of Occam's Razor

a lot of people that call themselves leftists just adopt “capitalism bad and culturally underdeveloped people good” as their core principle and go from there instead of reading the books

Honestly, (aside from the racist framing) if you follow these rules you'll probably be on the correct side of history 99% of the time

"culturally underdeveloped" has got to be the most liberal way of saying something racist I've ever heard. They might as well just come out and say savages or barbarians. How does this framework even operate? The USA is supposedly culturally developed? The only country that has dropped atom bombs on civilians and has the largest prison population? Ok.
- Cultural Development Nukes
- "culturally underdeveloped" has got to be the most liberal way of saying something racist I've ever heard.
  It's basically the same as 19th century liberal racism. White Man's Burden and so on
- "Barbarian/savages"
  
  "Culturally underdeveloped"
culturally undeveloped people
My
is emitting the Kill Bill siren
- And of course, then they immediately hide behind LGBT and women's rights when someone says "hey, that sounds a little racist"
"Cultural Development" is when capitalist think tanks place you high on their country rankings.
underdeveloped
its like that viral video about north korea, where the lady explains that if you just assume the US state department is lying you end up on the right side of history most times
That's the line that I couldn't stop staring at... Like, even in neolib brain world that is some thinly veiled racism.

leftists just adopt “capitalism bad and culturally underdeveloped people good” as their core principle and go from there instead of reading the books

This is fucking racist

The Avatar worldview. The James Cameron one, not the good one

Yeah sure ATLA certainly has no black and white message about the consequences of industrialism and imperialism on pre-industrial societies.

This exchange really exposes how disgusting liberals are
leftists just adopt “capitalism bad and culturally underdeveloped people good” as their core principle and go from there instead of reading the books
Lmao ghouls saying the quiet part out loud be less racist loser
Do you like lgbt rights,freedom of speech,rights for women? All of these are signs of an objectively more developed culture.cultures that don’t have these are worse for their own people. Or do you think every cultural practice holds equal value?

Using LGBT+ rights and women's rights as a racist cudgel to justify neoliberal economic policy and imperialism, which directly contributes to these nation's reactionary governments (and in many cases the imperialists fund and back reactionaries that PROMOTE these discriminatory governments). This is also ignoring all of the reactionary policies in the imperial core that are enacted by their favourite neoliberal politicians. These shitstains have no right to concern troll or virtue signal over minority rights and women's rights when they don't actually care about it.
Liberals are deeply unserious.
- Using LGBT+ rights and women's rights as a racist cudgel to justify neoliberal economic policy and imperialism, which directly contributes to these nation's reactionary governments (and in many cases the imperialists fund and back reactionaries that PROMOTE these discriminatory governments). This is also ignoring all of the reactionary policies in the imperial core that are enacted by their favourite neoliberal politicians. These shitstains have no right to concern troll or virtue signal over minority rights and women's rights when they don't actually care about it.
  It has just struck me that this is the same tactic Israel uses with antisemitism. It's self-reinforcing because it causes antisemitism in foreign countries, which causes jews to support Israel because of the antisemitism.
  The LGBT and women's rights cudgel the west uses to advance economic domination and power causes reactionary anti-lgbt behaviour in foreign countries, and in turn that homophobia and misogyny causes LGBT and women's rights people to even more strongly support the west.
- Do you like lgbt rights,freedom of speech,rights for women? All of these are signs of an objectively more developed culture.
  I fucking hate this type of guy
- The liberals think legal outcomes are the result of some nebulous idea of cultural practice!
  Every right we temporarily enjoy in capitalist countries was achieved by people chucking bombs or by threat of same. Do you enjoy working less than 21 hours a day and being paid in legal tender instead of company funbux? Then thank my ideological forebears for their service you fucking dweebs.
leftists just adopt “capitalism bad and culturally underdeveloped people good” as their core principle and go from there instead of reading the books
oh my god they said the quiet part out loud holy shit they're being racist as fuck
They're talking about the blue alien avatar, not the last airbender.
- I think their point is that both Avatars have anti-imperialist messaging, so singling one out as "the good one" betrays media illiteracy.
- They're mentioning both. The "good one" is ATLA and the Cameron one is the blue alien one
okay, i've come around, Avatar is a revolutionary text. sometimes our enemies can recognize a weapon that is hidden to us.
If you go further down the thread, he is arguing back and forth with someone, and is basically proposing historical racism as an alternative to historical materialism.

So many comments claiming marx is wrong because they don't understand what the "value" is in LTV. Some of them are literally saying he's wrong because he doesn't understand value is different to price which is lol

i swear i saw a comment that said this is the exact thing posters on that subreddit do; it's something to see it in action...
- It's super confusing because he covers this really really clearly in his initial definitions, which are like... On the first section, first page depending on your book.

I'm getting flashbacks to my mandatory Econ 101 course where the professor once asked me to leave the room because I had actually read Marx and could quote his actual words and thus got into a heated argument over what Communism was

I wasn't in trouble, but I was very much on the verge of throwing my backpack at a guy who kept insisting that welfare was communist

I'll take "Ill-advised things to say at an independent bookstore" for 500, Alex

Marxism is a way to view the world that has like 7 books written on it

buzzer
What is "words spoken immediately prior to getting crushed to death under a pile of books"?

"You say Cuba is a democracy, but it's been rated 3/10 burgers by the Freedom Burger Institute (partially funded by the CIA, partially funded by the American Christofascist caucus), check out this Wikipedia page."

Socially progressive policies that the people voted on directly.
- Not just voted on, but helped directly write through their participation in the thousands of local meetings by which the family code was formed as a text. This is a kind of strong democratic participation that liberals seem literally incapable of imagining
a country can be both an oppressive autocracy and have socially progressive policies
"Please help, my country is oppressing me into treating inferior people as equals!"
"You say Cuba is a democracy, but it's been rated 3/10 burgers by the Freedom Burger Institute (partially funded by the CIA, partially funded by the American Christofascist caucus), check out this Wikipedia page."
We don't even have to go there, just looking at the name, it seems to rank how "free" the market is, because that's all that matters to them libs. Democracy is when invisible hands or something.
- Democracy is when you can buy and sell things but especially fun little treats and goodies and yum yums so tasty I LOVE FREEDOM
- Measuring how free the market is while imposing massive sanctions on the country very cool
Honestly an autocracy with progressive values would probably do a better job of standing up to the heritage foundation at al. than whatever is going on here so that does sound like an improvement
Instead of answering your question about how America, the richest country on earth isnt able to adopt these social policies while Cuba can.
I will instead call Cuba authoritarian and an oppressive autocracy and not elaborate any further.
[lenin quote]
- which lenin quote?

I only read twenty pages of the first kapital.doesn’t the theory of value say that an item’s worth is increased by the amount of effort or time put into creating it?

Then there are posters agreeing with that definition. Oh my god, these people haven't read anything. Marx defines socially necessary labor time in chapter one, which this person claims to have read.

Culturally underdeveloped

Liberals breaking new grounds in ways to say racist things while using academic sounding jargon. Fuck these people. They think they're so culturally advanced and yet neoliberalism and the west are the biggest enablers of genocide worldwide. Apparently drone strikes are a feature of culturally advanced people

I only read twenty pages of the first kapital.doesn’t the theory of value say that an item’s worth is increased by the amount of effort or time put into creating it?

Most academically sophisticated liberal

Yep, that's the one.
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Marx failed to consider (thing he wrote about in Capital Volume 1, Chapter 1, Page 1)

boiled down to "you worked on a thing, so you deserve the entire revenue of that thing", which obviously isn't true. Like, if your employer lends you a hammer for free, shouldn't he be entilted to some of the profits that the hammer creates?

Good god the layers on this

I like to hit people with some variation of:
A couple years ago I hired a guy to patch my roof. Now I'm selling my house. How much of the proceeds should I give him?
People start twisting themselves in knots real fast with that example. They generally understand and accept home ownership even if they can't afford it but they simply can NOT empathize with equity holders otherwise.
Did you not pay your roofer wtf
- Even scholars whose theories aged far better like Darwin and Newton are similarly unreadable
  yeah those guys have been proved wrong a lot haven't they

Kapital is perfectly coherent to the extent that any early-to-mid-19th century economic treatise was. Economics was far less scientific than it is today and is both written very differently and comes to very different conclusions than Marx, which makes Kapital painful to read today
Even scholars whose theories aged far better like Darwin and Newton are similarly unreadable [emphasis mine]

:susie-laugh:

Watching neoliberal apologists try to disprove Marx is like me trying to disprove Darwin by citing a medieval bestiary
- Does Darwin account for a serpent hatching from a hen's egg?
- Darwin never consindered the Esquilax
It is truly incredible that these people have not only not read Marx, but also not read any Adam Smith or David Ricardo (even though they likely view Adam Smith as their 'more scientifically correct ancestor like Newton or Darwin'), so they have absolutely no conception that Marx is literally just expanding on both Smith and Ricardo's theories and works, testing their claims with newly available statistical economic data (that was collected because of initiatives by Smith and Ricardo but never actually followed up on because that is never how economic planning actually works in western democracies, nobody actually looks at real economic statistics outside of academia or bureaucratic functionaries, they simply publish them when they are in their favor) and expanding on their claims, taking them to their logical conclusions.
It's so infuriating to see them posit that something like the Labor Theory of Value is horseshit because it is from Marx when the Labor Theory of Value is not originally a Marxist claim, it is far older than that, but it was most explicitly a claim by Adam Smith that Marx then went to great lengths to provide evidence for and demonstrate how the value applied by labor affects commodity pricing of supply and demand based on it's 'usefulness'. AND THIS IS LITERALLY ON THE WIKIPEDIA PAGE 'LABOR THEORY OF VALUE'.
And that said, nowhere in Marx does he ever actually say 'Labor Theory of Value' because this is just his 'Theory of Value', which happens to center on labor because it is the only way that he was able to make sense of things like the gold inflationary crisis in Spain, or how cheap products from India could be priced despite their demand and distance (remember this is just prior to mass industrialization in Britain). From there he was able to extrapolate what was causing these events that contradicted a purely 'supply and demand' based system to create a model of exploitative economic relationships that actually run society, in direct contrast to the popular British utilitarian rhetoric at the time, which was about 'providing moral value (read now as jobs) to indolent and uncultured savages'.
As @GrouchyGrouse@hexbear.net pointed out, these neoliberals are quite literally the using the exact same appeal as those old British utilitarians, literally dressing up old unscientific and racist ideas in new clothing and attempting to pass them off as 'more modern' than Marxist economics.

Marxism is a way to view the world that has like 7 books written on it

The theory-reader has logged on.

Going to my local library and asking for every book and journal on Marxism since there's only 7 of them
The seven atheistically ordained high priests of Marxism huddle around the sacred texts. Only seven scrolls left, containing the sum total of their knowledge. One of the faceless grey men reaches out to unfurl a weathered papyrus scroll, as to refresh his fading memory of one of the True Precepts. As he tenderly teases it apart, the forces of time prove too much and the paper crumbles into dust, gently blowing away on the wind like smoke.
The Labor Theory of Value is no more.
The seven robed figures let out a wail, dissonant and useless.

I'm 6 months behind on my hammer rent

As a principled Marxist, all of my economic opinions derive from the Labor Theory of Value, hence if there were any valid criticisms of it, all my economic opinions would fall like dominoes.

Like, if your employer lends you a hammer for free, shouldn't he be entilted to some of the profits that the hammer creates?

Who built the ~~cages~~ hammer?

The level 17 jobcreators cast their job creation spells and all the materials required for the job assembled themselves out of nowhere.
He purchased the hammer on Amazon, which is a magical dimension from which you merely have to imagine an object for it to come into existence and then click the Purchase button, and then a happy little elf will deliver it to your front door

Don't call yourself a true communist unless you've read all seven books that were ever written about communism

Kapital Vol. 7: Karl Marx and the Deathly Hallows is a banger

Well if they actually read the books, they probably wouldn't be Marxists because they'd be forced to encounter the (wrong) Labour Theory of Value. That's how I left the left!

I hate liberals I hate liberals I hate liberals I hate liberals I hate liberals I hate liberals

I'd wage my life savings on the fact that if this nerd read a book, it was by someone who claims to have read Marx (but never really did) and disproves his theories based on vibes
- as a former turbo lib, I sincerely believe they looked at the words with their eyes, but never actually engaged with the text.
  The first time I read Marx as a teenager hopped up on Western liberal triumphalism, I treated Capital like Mein Kampf and was prepared to scoff at every paragraph, but Marx writes such turgid fucking sentences that I gave up after a couple pages because I couldn't understand what he was saying well enough to get my rocks off.

Regardless of politics, it’s the funniest shit when people say “Marx meant..”, or “What Marx failed to understand…”

The true Marx understanders are some of my favorite replyguys

endlessly entertaining when a group of people who assume themselves to be the Bestest Most Intelligent Politics And Geopolitics Understanders And The Adults In The Room run headfirst into a brick wall (literally reading a single page of a book ever in their entire lives, including the books of the people who they claim to be their patron saints, like Adam Smith)
I cannot stress enough that the average redditor has literally no idea what they are talking about. Drill them about literally ANYTHING and within 30 seconds, they find themselves unable to describe or explain anything, because they don't know anything beyond the facts and ideas that they've been given by other commenters who are just as moronic. 100% vibes-based. They might as well be ants following pheromone trails, except the pheromone trails are US state propaganda. Their desire to learn and retain new information about the world at large was extinguished halfway through middle school when they saw their first "but what if the curtains are just blue??!?" meme.
And zero of them have read Capital
- No dawg someone read the first 20 pages and that's literally all you need to know. The rest of Capital is actually just a really long aristocrats joke.

Well if they actually read the books, they probably wouldn't be Marxists because they'd be forced to encounter the (wrong) Labour Theory of Value. That's how I left the left!

LMFAO the dude saying this shit is a rabid zionist.

A shocking turn of events

people who want to materially align with fascism, but don't want to associate with the stigma that comes with it.
- They have the exact same views as fascism (they want to strengthen the state and the economy), but think fascist methods are not necessary/harmful.
  Say the distinction between "immigration makes the population angry, so the immigrants must be oppressed and used as cheap labor" and "immigration makes our companies rich, but we need to ensure they behave". It's no wonder that the saying scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds is accurate.
Those that think they're using it ironically. Even while agreeing with all that comes with it. So idiots
Wannabe Henry Kissingers (murder, coups, war included), liberal nationalists blindly following the state's ideology and the bourgeois (though those usually know better than to openly proclaim they want the ideology that would give them the most privileges).
It's a combination of comfort and contrarianism.

Reminder that r/neoliberal was created by and is astroturfed by a fossil fuel think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute, as part of their "Neoliberal Project"

PPI has been around since 1989 and views itself as Bill Clinton's "idea mill" aka think tank. Why I call them a fossil fuel think tank is detailed here. They oppose climate action, defend fracking, and receive donations from Exxon Mobil.

it's safe to say that their upvotes are farmed, and their organic support is mostly bourgeois economics and political science majors and interns who hope to work for PPI or a similar think tank one day. It's basically a Neera Tanden farm.

The creator of r/neoliberal, Colin Mortimer, is the Director of the Center for New Liberalism at PPI, which seeks to "develop a salient identity around the center-left values that have increasingly come under fire in this age of populism."

FYI you can use three backticks to fence entire blocks of code.
- helpful; thank you!

That comment thread is making my eye twitch.

https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/198kco3/i_cant_believe_i_need_to_explain_why_the_houthis/ki8upo3/

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First comment I saw

Marxism is a way to view the world that has like 7 books written on it, [...]

Most cultured anti-communist

That's the thing I remember most about becoming a leftist, a severe lack of reading material
- Right? I am a leftist and a Warhammer nerd the only thing not lacking in my life is reading material.

I wonder if the 7 books guy would like to read every book on marxism. Shouldn't take too long, we can read with him.

we should invite him to join the capital reading group

The only difference between these people and Ben Shapiro is that Ben listens to Wagner and Rachmaninoff and they listen to a spotify playlist called "Old School Gangster Rap."

This is beautiful. Every comment is perfection.

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