This is a Dengist community in favor of Bashar al-Assad with no information that can lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton, our fellow liberal and queen. This community is not ironic. We are Marxists-Leninists.
See this GitHub page for a collection of sources about socialism, imperialism, and other relevant topics.
This community is for posts about Marxism and geopolitics (including shitposts to some extent). Serious posts can be posted here or in /c/GenZhou. Reactionary or ultra-leftist cringe posts belong in /c/shitreactionariessay or /c/shitultrassay respectively.
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Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
☭ Matrix homeserver and space
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☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna's Archive
I'd just like to let you all in on a secret about me. I am all about High Quality Materialist analysis, that's what really gets my motor going.
Anti Vibe Based Aktion
Things are not looking good in Brazil.
do brazilian elections have the same bias as US elections, where votes for "right" candidates are generally counted and reported before votes for "left" candidates?
According to some rumors that I have read in a Telegram channel, it seems so.
This is the latest count
with this trend, is it likely that brazil will go to runoff elections?
If Flavio's count doesn't go beyond 50%, then it seems highly likely that a runoff election will happen.
😕
Animal Crossing by Eric Arthur Blair was truly the most prophetic book of all time.
I am so glad Nintendo decided to hire this underrated Indie developer that nobody has ever heard of.
Say...
...Ever played his game Cyberpunk 1984?
You probably haven't heard of it.
reading this chonk now. absolutely loving so far
Could someone help understand use-values?
Is use-value something a commodity has, or something a commodity is? (or is this question incorrect?)
Relevant quotes from The Capital:
In the following quote, he defines an use-value as being inseparate from the thing:
The utility of a thing makes it a use value.[4] But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity.
Here Marx kind of talks about use value as separate:
To resume, then: In the use value of each commodity there is contained useful labour, i.e., productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim.
A commodity has use value in so far as it can be used by a human being to do something. Without humans it is just a chunk of matter. But the ways in which a human can use it is particular to it's matter.
These commodities are all made by human labor. The act of producing a commodity which is useful means that the labor is useful because it produces a useful commodity.
I think it's pretty interesting how much Marx probes each object with different lenses in his work. Like you said, a thing can be a natural-form (chunk of matter) or value-form (how humans see it), labor is abstract or concrete etc.
I have read about dialectics before but seeing how Marx does it and how his German is translated, it confused me quite a bit, hence the question. Still, commodity is a pretty cool thing to study.
Also, I liked your last sentence. Pretty great summary.
Yes, a key part of reading Marx is understanding which set of abstractions he is using at a given moment. He operates on different levels of abstaction at different points and writes as if he is just testing them out to see if they work, so you need to think about which one applies at a given time.
Use value is something that a commodity has because of how people use it. Rare earth minerals were essentially without any use value for most of history but now they have significant use value.
The value is imparted by its use but it can only be used that way because of its properties.
I used to be pro-death penalty but I've come around on it. The state shouldn't have the ability to kill you, especially if they can't guarantee that you're superhuman and can survive a lethal injection. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ahead-rare-execution-lone-woman-tennessee-death-row-says-peace-rcna600279
It'd just be mindless cruelty to do anything more.