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Das Kapital, Karl Marx's magnum opus, is a scientific analysis that seeks to understand (and critique) the dynamics of capitalist societies. It has nothing to do with the confabulations of Jordan Peterson, political expedience of Twitter personalities, or misnomers of your grandparents. The logic of their takes is akin to blaming the writer of whale mating and migration patterns for illegal fishermen using the information to more effectively hunt whales. Or in some cases [logically], that the writer wants to become a whale himself.

"Freedom is participation in power."

Marx quotes Cicero, and offers an exhaustive methodology of what that means. Those five words have always captured so well what bitcoin means to me conceptually. As the book densely moves along, it ticks every box bitcoiners have identified as systemic problems, and in bitcoin's final form (as a money standard) seems to satisfy them all:
  • separating money from state
  • demonetizing the political class
  • redirecting efficiency
  • consumption by time preference
  • deprecating banks
  • direct ownership and control of your wealth
  • financial inclusion
  • saving the fruits of your labor
  • disinflationary so everyone shares in the labor of others
  • the more goods and services added to the economy the more value every laborer accrues
  • fixed monetary principles
  • fixed liberties
The value theory attaches not to what the individual laborer does, rather labor en masse, globally. It answers the surplus value observation with time inversion. I'm not a Marx expert, I'm only elucidating my post-bitcoin reactions to Das Kapital, where bitcoin has helped me understand concepts I never did about Marx going back to my initial exposure in college, which, like most of the top search items on YouTube et al, was a walk through the fever swamps of conspiracy, revolution, and wide-eyed warnings.
Curious to hear your takes, sats for replies as always, you know the rules.
The more you understand Bitcoin, the more you understand it has more than just capitalistic components to it. I believe Bitcoin is an entirely new system that we are only able to adjacently fit into the structures of Capitalism at best.
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I like this. Das Kapital's observations of capitalism under centralized monies is just another tool that gives us the knowledge to develop better solutions and understand things clearer. People of all walks seem to take it as some grand ideological statement and have far too strong reactions to it. You have to put together a mosaic of economic intelligence to have a better picture, just like philosophy, politics, anything really. I agree with and disagree with things the Austrians, Marxists, Keynesians, and Classical economists say. And yes decentralized money is absolutely a new paradigm.
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he's faux pas for no reason really,,,lots of bitcoiners like mark moss bash him almost like they're trying to clean something off a themselves
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I feel bitcoin distinguishes itself from all forms of money and economic schools of thought, while incorporating many of their best qualities.
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These are interesting thoughts and it's always good to be able to draw insights from even the most deeply flawed works. I don't think it's correct to think of Das Kapital as truly scientific, because he doesn't contend with the ideas of his contemporaries. It is fair to think of it as a serious work, though.
My take is that nothing can satisfy Marx's model, because it was based on now defunct economic theory. Marx was a contemporary of the Marginal Revolution, but he didn't incorporate their insights about subjective value that are the basis of current economic theory. He was probably the last major writer in the Labor Theory of Value tradition.
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I guess I meant scientific in the same way as political science, which I believe is a term coined by Aristotle ← I'm not using an argument of authority here, because there are good arguments to the contrary.
I'm curious to know why you call it defunct economic theory?
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The classical economists (Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, Marx) believed that value was generated from the amount of labor required to produce a good. This theory had many major problems that were well known at the time.
At the time of Marx's writing, several economists (Jevons, Walras, Menger) independently came up with the central insight of modern economics: value is subjective. There is no way to calculate how valuable a good will be based on it's input costs. The only way to measure it is to let prices adjust and find out what people are willing to pay for it. Even then, all we've learned is that the goods sold at the prevailing price were worth more than their price to whomever purchased them and less to those who sold them (also, technically, that additional units are worth less to potential buyers than to potential sellers).
Subjective Value Theory is what let us come up with ideas like diminishing marginal returns and increasing marginal costs. In an objective value framework those core ideas don't make any sense and we can't explain almost any economic activity.
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Subjective value is interesting especially in the digital economy as we move along, specifically digital products, services, and ai. Surplus value I think still holds, and many of his big observations on the results of capital accumulation directionally have played out perfectly since industrialization with little resets along the way by way of anti-trust, and boom-bust cycles. Feels like we're entering a very different paradigm tho. Decentralization of money, renewable energy, digitization, and Ai were never accounted for in any economic models. A lot of economists try to shoehorn one or two into the system we have now. I feel all of these things are too base layer (fundamental) and composable for the status quo.
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Karl Marx was a gnostic heretic, fraud and grifter whose theories are of no value to anyone. Marxist ideology runs much deeper than economics and has led to the death of 100 million people in the 20th century.
Reject the dialectic.
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Yeah I addressed that in the first paragraph: "The logic of their takes is akin to blaming the writer of whale mating and migration patterns for illegal fishermen using the information to more effectively hunt whales." Das Kapital is an objective book that methodologically explains the workings of capitalism under a centralized money standard. I was talking about that book specifically, not what authoritarians did a century later. Is Jesus responsible for the Spanish Inquisition?
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I dont think your whale hunting analogy is adequate for the philosophical subversion in Marx’s “Critique”.
He wasnt a cogent, disinterested student of economics. He was an aberrant theologian who viewed existence through the dialectic, not as it really is.
He was the opposite of scientific.
Did he hit on a few points that conform to reality? Probably. But since, to Marx, truth and lies can be dialectically synthesized into a higher understanding, his work is of little value. Except as a warning of what not to do and how not to think.
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Marx was important. He explained capitalism in a way nobody had yet, and his ideas were an important tool for subsequent economists and thinkers to develop a better understanding, and build better models. Most take the mention of Marx as a grand ideological position. I don't. His ideas simply get added to the mosaic of economic intelligence through the centuries, and it gives us all a richer understanding. Things as old as that, preserved through writing (this can include music) don't survive at large in the global consciousness if they have no value.
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Yes, he explained capitalism in a way that no one had, because he was ascribing demiurgic creative power to market economics that, he claimed, were necessarily exploitive and alienated man from his true socialist nature. Wrong, wrong, deadly and wrong.
His analysis adds nothing of value. Its based on a hyperreality that doesn’t exist.
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a scientific analysis that seeks to understand (and critique) the dynamics of capitalist societies. It has nothing to do with the confabulations of Jordan Peterson, political expedience of Twitter personalities, or misnomers of your grandparents.
A long and dense work on economic theory has nothing to do with "political expedience" simply because it's not the best place to learn about someone's political views. Marx's political views are summarized in "The Communist Manifesto". It's short and readable, so read that one If you want to see for yourself that Marx was an autoritarian shithead. Then the reaction of Twitter personalities to Marx might make more sense.
"Freedom is participation in power."
This is how leftists use the word "freedom", but that roughly corresponds to libertarian (or all rightists?) usage of "optionality". For libertarians, "freedom" means the absense of coercion, as in being left alone. The leftists don't seem to understand how offensive their attempts to redefine "freedom" are, especially as no replacement word is offered. In this example, "freedom is participation in power" sounds roughly as "we're never going to leave you alone so we'll just give you a useless vote and proclaim that it makes you free".
separating money from state
Das Kapital was written well into the gold standard century (1815-1914). The problem of separating money from the state could not exist back then in any form that resembles the present situation.
from the comments:
and many of his big observations on the results of capital accumulation directionally have played out perfectly since industrialization
My guess is that about 50% of his directional (that is, either up or down) observations have played out perfectly (for example, he said up and it went up), while the other 50% of his directional observations have played out in the perfectly opposite direction.
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stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.