Did you ignore my comment earlier explaining that socialism has been fantastic for the working classes?

Why? Unhappy that Marxist-Leninists support the LGBTQIA+ community?

Yes, I largely agree. When I speak of “empiricism,” the notion in English Marxist circles is often used to refer to “stupid materialism,” as you called it, as it implies this materialism stops at empiricism and does not go into dialectics. That’s why, even if we use empiricism, we do not identify as “empiricists” but “dialectical materialists.”

To be clear, I don’t believe you are a subjective idealist. I believe that your nostalgia for a once great and now lost USSR has colored your analysis, but I believe you in general are more of a materialist. My critique of certain points of yours as metaphysical or idealist is constrained to those positions.

As for the progress in China, it’s already happening at a breakneck pace. Conditions are improving in China faster than anywhere else in the world. So what if they made a deal with the western devil? The soviets did so too during the NEP, the CPC revisited that idea and modified it to their contemporary conditions. Any comparison between the snake Khrushchev and Deng Xiaoping has to be understood in that Khrushchev downplayed the entirety of socialist construction thus far, creating historical pessimism, while Deng made it clear that Mao and Stalin were to be upheld, and that class struggle was alive and must be carefully fought.

The Soviet models of socialism were not idealist, nor subjective. It was materialist, worked well, and was well-suited to the Soviet Union’s conditions. My issue was the idea that if, say, Bolivia’s ongoing protests erupt into revolution, that they should copy some period of the Soviet Union’s models of socialism, rather than learn from it and adapt to their own conditions. Bolivia’s conditions are not the same as the USSR’s.

As for Trotsky being for the NEP and Stalin being against it, the NEP ending early ended up being fortuitous in preparing for World War II. Had World War II not been on the horizon, then perhaps extending it may have been correct, to help develop light industry more. In China’s case, their socialist market economy was handled in such a way as to rely on largely de-industrialized economies, thus the risk of war was lower while in the USSR a war was always around the corner.

As for “western Marxism,” in the west it is used as a pejorative against Marxists that vulgarize Marx and Lenin, opposing socialist states. I am happy that you meant no offense by it, comrade.

China is democratic, and all states are inherently authoritarian in that they all are tools of domination by the ruling class. China’s ruling class is the proletariat.

You’re reading the spheres of influence aspect of Molotov-Ribbentrop with hermeneutics of suspicion. The implication on your end is that the Soviets expected the pact to hold, and to split Europe with Nazi Germany. This implies the expectation of a lasting alliance, which is immediately thrown out the window when you see just how much the Soviets were preparing for war against the Nazis, and that the Red Army was specifically told to watch out for German soldiers.

Regarding Poland in particular, the Soviet sphere of influence, again, was made up of areas Poland had violently annexed from countries like Lithuania and Ukraine only a couple decades prior. The Soviets did not plan on conquesting Poland, they simply stated that Nazi Germany was not allowed to take former Soviet land. When Poland was invaded by Germany, the state was destroyed, and the Red Army took formerly Lithuanian, Ukrainian, etc areas, sparing them from the Holocaust.

Would you want the entirety of Poland to go to the Nazis? Should the USSR have gone to war with Nazi Germany then and there, with the possibility of the west aiding the Nazis to take out the USSR?

As for the West, again, you ignore that at the time they were quite honest with wanting to contain the Bolsheviks. They were more than willing to work with the Nazis, America even kept trading with them during the war, and American factories were deliberately not targeted in Nazi Germany even if Nazis were hiding in them. Truman was honest:

If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.

The whole time in the background, Britain and France were attempting to get the Soviets and Nazis to kill each other off. France spread faulty rumors of a fabricated speech by Stalin wanting to conquest Europe, Britain warned Germany of an impending soviet attack at the same time they warned Russia of Barbarossa, and the Nazis themselves were constantly posturing around either invading Britain, using Crete as a template for naval invasion, or making a deal with them. Before Barbarossa, Rudolf Hess flew to England, drawing the appearance of an impending deal.

The entirety of the pre-War period was a tumultuous game of trying to decide what the lines of the war would be. The west made it clear that it hated the Soviets, and the Soviets made it clear that they hated the Nazis, but did not want to risk both the Nazis and the west coming after them, which would have been unwinnable most likely. Nobody could be confused of an actual Soviet-Nazi alliance.

All you need for commodity exchange is for people to accept something is yours and be willing to exchange something they own which you desire in return for it. That thing being a product of labor is not necessary. You can own land based on agreement without taking any trouble to cultivate or defend it, and exchange it for other things based on agreement. You can exchange naturally occurring things without rendering them ~crystallizations of social labor.

Yes? Marx talks about natural resources. Land is covered more in volume 3, but nevertheless this is fully accounted for. Natural resources take extraction to refine and produce, and the concept of owning land requires a body to uphold that, the state, and the value of land itself is tied to how productive it can make you. All value comes from labor and natural resources, this is straight from Capital.

Marx’s argument is invalid in another way because there are so many qualities commodities share besides being products of labor.

This does not make his argument invalid, though. What’s common is that the makeup of commodities can be reduced entirely to the labor and raw materials that went into them.

Now, I know that the law of value is supposed to come specifically with highly developed industrial society with large scale social production which makes the abstract real etc etc however the issue is that this then messes with Marx’s argument I went over in the prev comment where he tries to prove the LTV by going over the concept of commodities/commodity exchange as such without regard for this.

No, you never disproved anything.

The argument only doesn’t apply for the first reason. There’s no necessity even for Marx that commodities be arbitrarily “difficult” to produce.

There is, though. A commodity’s value isn’t dependent on how much labor went into that individual commodity, but that commodity as a social product, ie on average. If someone spends 10 hours on a mud pie that takes 2 seconds to create on average, it’ll be just as close to worthless as the rest. Further, labor that is more skilled (harder to socially reproduce) or more compressed than the social average does produce more value. Value is a social characteristic, not an individual one.

How is this a response to what I said?

Because you’re confusing the fact that prices reflect value with the idea that people independently think of that before purchasing.

This is both incorrect (for Marx, value is entirely determined by socially necessary labor time) and doesn’t mean anything (this is like multiplying 3 apples by 7 pears, what does it mean that the value of a commodity can be reduced to labor and natural resources?; with value being determined by labor time you can reduce things to a certain quantity, but then you just add on a qualitatively different thing and you return to the original problem of needing a third equivalent, or a value to unite the components of value).

You’re mixing up Exchange-Value with Use-Value. All use-value comes from labor and natural resources, but natural resources themselves can be reduced to the labor required to gather them and refine them, etc. All socially necessary labor time means is that it takes society on average a certain amount of labor to create something, and natural resources can be themselves reduced to labor. 3 apples and 7 pears both may take the same amount of labor on average to create them, and thus their prices naturally gravitate near the same value.

You forgot to explain how this actually occurs. You just say that capitalism does it.

Through the market. Buying and selling of goods, competition, all of this from the perspective of the capitalist confronts them as input costs and profits. Competition forces prices towards a floor, lack of competition brings in new competitors which then brings the price back to being roughly as profitable as the rest. Capital essentially functions as a control system.

You should tell Marx this since he expressly says that he thinks the only universal is labor. You both happen to be wrong, though.

You should actually read Capital, because Marx quite literally states this.

Use-values like coats, linen, etc., in short, the physical bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements, the material provided by nature, and labour. If we subtract the total amount of useful labour of different kinds which is contained in the coat, the linen, etc., a material substratum is always left. This substratum is furnished by nature without human intervention. When man engages in production, he can only proceed as nature does herself, i.e. he can only change the form of the materials.[17] Furthermore, even in this work of modification he is constantly helped by natural forces. Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.[18]

Marx isn’t wrong, and neither am I, it seems you genuinely haven’t opened Capital because this is in the first few pages. I’m not sure whose alt you are, given that this is a 2 comment account, so I’m not sure why you’re trying to start an argument on Capital without even reading the first chapter of the first volume.

Yep, another win! Just not a human there and back.

Oh really? How do you hold the people in power accountable, then, if they’re part of the only party that is allowed to exist (which that party itself decided, what a coincidence!)?

Recall elections, consultative democracy, electing candidates, etc.

False, that is the result of capitalism when it goes unchecked, not the definition. And different countries have different levels of checks on capitalism.

Capitalism cannot be “checked.” Capitalism inevitably tends towards centralization of the essential means of production and distribution into fewer and fewer hands, but even in the earliest stages capitalists were far outnumbered by workers.

Yeah, no, that’s not the case. Otherwise explain to me how many western countries have leftist parties and even marxist-leninist parties. It’s just not the will of the majority. Which leads me back to the point: your (or even my) satisfaction with the results don’t measure how democratic a country is, despite the FUD spread by authoritarians and wannabe authoritarians to destabilize democracies by encouraging people to not participate.

Very few leftist parties can get anything done in western countries because the media is largely controlled by capitalists, and the state itself serves capitalists. Taking PSL as an example, a great deal more people agree with their positions than the ~1% of the vote they receive, but they are either actually barred from running, or receive a tiny portion of the vote due to not wanting to spoil your vote, as well as a lack of positive publicity from media (or any publicity, for that matter).

Saying they beat the Americans in the space race several times over doesn’t mean the Statesians didn’t make it to the moon first, it means the Soviets beat them to many major milestones, yet this is brushed under the rug.

The Soviets were the first to space, first to send probes to Venus, first animals in space, first returning animals from space, first humans in space, and more. The moon landing was a huge milestone, sure, but the soviets took a number of firsts themselves.

Do you think that people don’t work in China? Cuba, Korea, Vietnam? Laos? Do you think they didn’t work in the USSR, when they went from feudalism to space in half a century? I really don’t think you understand how socialism works in real life, or how production in the future will be run.

Lenin the GOAT

That’s not how it works, the people work and capitalists make all of the money, and use the state to prevent people from getting uppity.

Money in general becomes superfluous if all production and distribution is collectivized and run along a scientific plan. If you develop beyond markets, why do you need money?

We are talking about communism, it sounds like you’re talking about welfare and getting upset at those on welfare and not the capitalists that plunder all of the social surplus. Of course capitalists control the state, the state serves the ruling class.

You are describing capitalism. Capitalists plunder the surplus value created by the working classes. Production is already socialized and collaborative, but the spoils go to a tiny handful of people.

Elections aren’t democracy, as you said democracy is rule by the majority. Pluralism, the ability to choose between parties, isn’t actually democracy either. A single party system can be more democratic if it’s a consultative democracy and reflects the will of the majority, like how it works in China (though China obviously has many, many elections). That also doesn’t mean pluralism is inherently antidemocratic, countries like the DPRK have multiple political parties with seats (even if the majority are held by the WPK), just that the will of the majority be upheld.

In capitalism, a tiny class of people controls the most essential means of production and distribution for society. The state represents their interests, and any parties that exist must represent them, or instead have strong grassroots support and work against the state (such as the Bolsheviks). Choosing between any number of capitalist parties doesn’t mean workers are going to be represented. No western country represents the will of the majority.

Nah, most seem in support of it.

Cheers back!