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I was reading chapter 3 of The Capital vol. 1.
So, as far as I understand it, Marx is laying the groundwork for understanding capital. It's easy to see this by how money kind of "outlasts" the commodities being exchanged. It keeps circulating even when commodities are consumed.
However, I kind of don't understand why Marx starts to talk about gold in the section The Currency of Money.
long quotes
[...] Money, on the contrary, as the medium of circulation, keeps continually within the sphere of circulation, and moves about in it. The question therefore arises, how much money this sphere constantly absorbs?
In a given country there take place every day at the same time, but in different localities, numerous one-sided metamorphoses of commodities, or, in other words, numerous sales and numerous purchases. The commodities are equated beforehand in imagination [...]
As a matter of fact, the money in reality represents the quantity or sum of gold ideally expressed beforehand by the sum of the prices of the commodities. [...] We know, however, that, the values of commodities remaining constant, their prices vary with the value of gold. (Why mention this?)
Maybe it's the fact that bourgeois education taught me to treat money strictly as an abstract thing so I can't see the connection, but I don't know why Marx decided to mention gold here when we are talking about price and circulation.
I'll try to read it again tomorrow.
Edit: I got it
Glad it clicked. Those foundational chapters of Capital are a bit of a slog but once they click together you get a way more complete understanding of the core ideas of economics that most people just assume they understand based on vibes and subjective context.
i had a dream polish reactionaries were annoying the fuck out of me. i don’t know why, i’m not from poland or anywhere related, haven’t talked to a pole in ever
it was kind of hilarious. i’ve been pretty sick and am also in australia rn. the dream came in a nap shortly after i had taken medication that made me really drowsy and seen a falun gong table outside that made me chortle. i guess i came back and dozed off mad as hell about anti-communist misinfo
i distinctly remember having very lucid (as in cogent, not aware i was dreaming) thoughts in my dream, i don’t know the context but i was on the rooftop somewhere (i think i had lost toys up there, and was angrily trying to gather them, which was unrelated to anything else) grumbling about revisionist history where ussr was ‘expansionist’ with regards to molotov-ribbentrop, or however ussr conducted themselves during or after ww2
i remember some guy my dream imagined who was anti-communist polish and writing young adult, space themed novels about poland post ww2 (to be fair, it was sick as FUCK in my dream, vague images or visuals of this novel series came in my head, i remember a huge golden bust against inky black space). it was like he was doing historical fiction but also the backdrop was space?! which is, again, admittedly sick. and yet i still don’t get a single bit WHY I WAS DREAMING ABOUT POLISH PEOPLE😭
I know this is me being neurotic again but I hate the phrase "powered by ai." Like...what? No its powered by electricity. Designed by ai, enhanced with ai, whatever. But its not "powered" by it.
Photos of a celebration of Lula reelection in Brazil!
I wish I could be friends with these people
This makes me want to leave the United States.
Come to Brazil lol
Mbappe got metaphorically smacked very beautifully by China due to his disrespectful comments regarding Mao Zedong.
I love it tho Mbappe is not that terrible politically as other footballers so it kinda sucks it happened to him. But props to China for putting a stop to the infantile and malicious slander of their political figures, lie after lie turned the characterization of Mao as a dictador in the west while Mao is widely loved in his country.
Honestly, it is good that he was made an example. It feels nice when libs can't get away with their anticommunist slanders.
::: spoiler cw drugs
I have been given Xanax for the time being and ngl it is kinda nice to lose the ability to feel anything if you need it. But I get the addiction perspective of it.
The proles shall not be drugged into submission, though.
I really don't understand why some churches depict Satan in "demonic" fashion. Dude is supposed to look like an "angel of light". He isn't supposed to look obviously evil. Who's gonna get tempted by that??
If I see some hooded old guy or horned beast offering riches in exchange for my soul, I'm not gonna take that offer based on his looks alone.
These churches don't even read the lore smh
I think that depiction is showing what happens when you sell out.
Makes sense then. I guess images are supposed to be symbolic.
New Oppo dropped I am a witch now
Cute cat
...raccoon...
Ah you're right
New Oppo dropped, before Gta 6.
That's a really cute profile picture.
🤍
a cute witch
Sometimes I find myself wanting to go like "what would my life be like if xyz part of my life had gone differently?" That sort of thing. I spose in kind of a regretful way, like wishing for a better path. But then, from a diamat point of view, it seems about as meaningful as asking "what if I was a different person?" I mean, my genetics would be the same still, but if my early life had been significantly different for example, I wouldn't have a lot of the same memories that I have, I wouldn't have had a lot of the same experiences that I had to grow from. There'd still be aspects of me that would be the same (namely, predispositions) but the rest of it could be pretty different.
But I might be looking at it in more of an old paradigm way too. Maybe the communist way would be to say "yeah, it could have been better and here's how" for the purposes of better understanding what needs to be better for people broadly going forward. I can't change what the foundation of my life was, but I can try to contribute to other people having a better foundation.
This is a beautiful attitude. I'm more of the mind justice may be more us learning to accept, only keep past memories as data points for mapping a way forward, releasing resentments. The body will follow the mind.
I'm still surprised that quantum physics was deemed "Bourgeois" during the cultural revolution. Like the more I look into it, it feels very dialectical. Hell it even reflects mao's quote about having to interact with things to discover their qualities.
The only thing might be that, if you phrase it wrong, it sounds idealist with the whole observation thing. But that's just because people misphrase it when simplifying it, and Shrodinger's box which wasn't actually meant to explain superposition
Can someone explain the right to bear arms in communist spaces. I get that it's to have a protection against oppression among other reasons but I mean people still going to kill each other look at the US for example and suicide is gonig to rise too, So I'm not really sure if it's worth the damage is going to do to society.
Look I know it's not in people's nature to commit gun violence it's the symptoms of the system and lack of any support for mentally struggling people but at the same time I look at myself and if I had gun I would do it too. that's the reason I don't fully get it still.
What country are you talking about? Are you talking about a socialist country like China or are you talking about a capitalist dictatorship like the US? Because as always the answer will differ and depend on what kind of society you are talking about. One in which the state is hostile to the working class or one in which the working class controls the state? Only in one of those does the working class need to be armed independently of the state in order to defend itself from the state (and eventually overthrow it). In the other, the working class is already armed because the workers's state controls the army and police.
"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
But also
"Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party."
Also, when the fascists are armed it would be irresponsible for leftist organizations to disarm their own members. Mind however that individual ownership of weapons is not the same as an armed working class. Arming the working class means having weapons in the hands of the organized vanguard of the working class. Without an ideologically disciplined organization you don't have an armed class, you just have a bunch of random idiots with guns.
Thank you so much for your in-depth explanation I understand now.
I mean this as a genuine question and not a gotcha: what if the halls of power are taken over by counter-revolutionaries? e.g. what happened with the Eastern Bloc.
Civilian gun ownership doesn't stop counter-revolutions. If the people are motivated and organized enough to mount an armed defense of the revolution then the conditions would not have arisen in the first place to where that defense is necessary. Counter-revolution happens when the accumulation of errors made is so grave that the people are too demoralized to fight the reactionary takeover.
The Soviet Union didn't fall because the people lacked weapons. The Soviet army had plenty of weapons, why didn't they stop it? Why didn't the security forces? Power doesn't come from simply "occupying the halls of power", it comes from the consent of an entire apparatus of state, which in turn rests on having the consent of at least a certain part of the population and the compliance of the rest.
There is this Chinese documentary that analyzed and summarized the causes of the fall of the Soviet Union that might be interesting for you to watch if you want to understand the conditions that were present in 1991 which made it so that, weapons or no, the population was no longer willing to defend the system. Preventing counter-revolution can only be done by not letting things get to that critical point in the first place.
how did these "vested interest groups" gain prominence (1:06:45)? how did the very next general secretary after stalin end up being khrushchev? what was going on that made it such a quick process?
it would be an odd combination for a counterrevolution to be so incompetent as to create the conditions for an armed revolt yet so competent as to be able to destroy the revolution. in other words, i suspect that gun ownership rates will be immaterial as they are in the US today. i don't have a whole lot of certainty in that, so maybe a comrade familiar with albania could solidify things in one direction or the other? i mention them because, tentatively, it seems to me as though the high gun ownership didn't stop that particular counterrevolution.
Arms are a resource that need to be collectively, not individually, controlled so as to ensure they're used appropriately.
Makes sense thanks.
The control of arms should ideally be in the hands of the workers councils and the communist party (or parties), which may then delegate control to the red army and central comittee etc., or to individual members or cadre groups as deemed appropriate.
for some reason Voyager and Raccoon are both blocked on the hospital's WiFi. none of my other apps have any issues but both of my lemmy apps can't load anything. no idea why that would be