#marx's capital

[flesh-is-the-fever]

I'm up to the "I dunno maybe children working 13 hour shifts is bad, guys" part of Capital and it feels important to inform people that haven't read it yet that capitalists in the 19th century were not by any means wringing their hands and twirling their mustaches about employing children to squeeze out profits, they were hiring "experts" to write newspaper articles for them, explaining how "well, the socialists have these big demands about an 8-hour work day, and taking Saturdays off, but it's actually just so complicated, it's too complicated for most people to understand, we just NEED to hire children for night shifts because the stamina of their strong, youthful bodies is the only way we can survive as a business! It's science, you see. Economics doesn't work like that, just ask our economics professors at Oxford. You CAN'T turn a profit only working people 8 hours! Trust the experts, they know. It's just so complicated..."

That exact infuriating cadence that you read in New York Times articles, in the Atlantic Monthly, in the WaPo and all the other bourgeois rags where "everything is so complicated, and it's actually a lot more complicated than you think.." that has been around since the beginning. It is nothing new. So the next time you see some op-ed from Matt Yglesias or any of those other guys huffing their own farts about how "complicated" everything is, and how "unrealistic" a 30-hour work week is, remember that Marx was dealing with that exact class of "intellectuals" "explaining" how working 13 hours at age 10 was "vital" to the "moral fibre" of those poor kids.

[pinsforfingerz]

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

[lilithism1848]

[no-gods-no-masters-tshirts]

[nerdjpg]

Labor is measured in time and space must have labor to transform the environment for capitalist productivity.

So we will enforce the concept of an “earth hour” on other planetary bodies

Every day there are new horrors

[dailymarx]

There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery

Karl Marx - New York Tribune 1859

[queercodedangel]

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance." - Karl Marx, The German Ideology

[communistkenobi]

I had to read Durkheim over the summer and was completely unprepared for how racist he is. I mean I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a French guy in the 1930s loved to talk about skull shapes but for a man credited as a founding father of sociology I thought he would have something slightly more interesting to say. like it’s pretty unfair putting him next to Weber and Marx when his biggest theoretical contribution seems to be “class conflict in society will decrease as the European cranium produces more laws that make it illegal to get mad at your boss”

[capitalism-and-analytics]

[bilbobagginsomebabez]

i think more people should ask themselves if they're being a leftist or if they're propagating white supremacist culture with a leftist filter applied.

picking a political ideology isn't like picking a team in a sport or searching for one true answer. you're asking questions about what types of organization in what contexts accomplish our goals, and more than that, you should be asking yourself how to build or encourage those things right now. (in the immediate future, this is feeding people, housing people, and getting them medical care. lots of different ways to do this respectfully and with autonomy)

if you're a staunch communist/socialist/anarchist or any further hyperspecific derivative and you're absolutely convinced that Your Plan is the ONLY path forward, that sounds a lot like paternalism and only one right way.

next time you feel the need to do a leftist infighting, why don't we do a leftist action against white supremacy instead:

-accept that there are many ways to get to the same goal

-work on developing the ability to notice when people do things differently and how those different ways might improve your approach

highly encourage everyone to read the full essay

[oceanicmarxist]

During the Spanish revolution and the ensuing civil war, Spanish workers and peasants engaged in anti-clerical violence against the Church that spent centuries raping, molesting, murdering, beating, abusing, and oppressing them.

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

bUt WhAt AbOut MuH tOoThBrUsH???

[lilithism1848]

[no-gods-no-masters-tshirts]

[queerism1969]