Nick

You are not a Marxist if you require secondary sources to interpret a readily available primary source.

Council Communist

PFP by Beejiebean.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

@MacroHorizon @RTSG_Main The economic calculation problem has been refuted for nearly a century. Only the Knowledge Problem hasn't, and this only refers to soviet-style central planning, not Marxist planning.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

@ProletariatRis1 No, those are requirements of socialism. "Socialism" is shorthand for "lower phase of communism". The lower phase of communism still has a state (gemeinwesen).

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

No? You're meant to do both, you implement the LPC and apply internationalism.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

No it isn't, the abolition of commodity production, wage labor, and the value-form are requirements of socialism, not communism.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

@RedPill_Marxism No, socialism (LPC) is when you abolish commodity production, wage labor, and the value-form. Not when you take action against businesses, that's just social democracy. You're a social democrat.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

You'd need to cite Marx becsuse you're claiming it's a dictatorship of the proletariat, so you need to back up your claim.

And no, Marx uses analysis and materialism, that's why it's scientific. Doesn't mean you can do the complete opposite in reality and claim it's "socialism in reality". You're coping.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

@RedPill_Marxism You're an idealist.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

@nedenolmasinki3 @poopeating_ @CZPamphlets Cite where Marx said this? Because the party is a singular organization in the class, so dictatorship of the party =/= dictatorship of the class (proletariat), especially when said party suppresses the class's independent organs.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

How were the Bolsheviks a dictatorship of the proletariat when the Bolsheviks specifically stripped the proletariat of their power and destroyed/subordinated the working class organs like the soviets and factory committees?

The Paris Commune is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Marx said so, Engels especially said so. What makes you think abolishing proletarian democracy and independent proletarian organs is the dotp?

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

@ComunistaOpres4 None of those states were socialist.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

@nedenolmasinki3 @poopeating_ @CZPamphlets Name a single time the vanguard ever established the dictatorship of the proletariat. Also, go ahead and quote Marx ever agreeing with this point.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

"Landlord is post-feudalism."

The word "landlord" derives from Old English "landhlaford" (land + hlaford, meaning loaf-ward/lord of the land), used during the Anglo-Saxon and Norman feudal periods. The Domesday Book (1086) catalogues feudal land holdings. Feudal lords were literally defined by their lordship over land. The entire feudal system was organized around land tenure. "Landlord" is not a post-feudal term. It is the most feudal term that exists. The feudal system IS a system of landlords.

You told me to learn where the word "landlord" comes from and then got the history of the word wrong. Talk about a moron.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

Feudal land tenure was more complex than "the lord owned everything." You're confusing modern property law with the feudal system.

Serfs were bound to the land, yes, but they held customary use-rights to their strips in the open field system. They worked their own parcels for their own subsistence and owed the lord obligations (labor service on the lord's demesne, rent in kind, later money rent). The lord held the manor. The serf held customary rights to their strips, their cottage, their tools, and access to the commons (common pasture, woodland, gleaning rights). These rights were legally recognized and defended in manorial courts. Serfs could not be arbitrarily removed from their land in most feudal systems precisely because their customary tenure was a recognized legal relationship.

Beyond serfs, freeholders and yeomen DID own their land outright under feudal law. Not all peasants were serfs. The English countryside contained freeholders, copyholders, leaseholders, and serfs, all with different degrees of tenure security. "Peasant" is not a synonym for "serf."

But none of this matters for the point being made. Even if we grant that the lord held ultimate title: the peasant still had direct access to means of production (land through customary right, their own tools, common resources), still produced primarily for their own subsistence, and still was NOT selling their labor power as a commodity to an employer. The social relation (lord-serf, defined by customary obligation and direct access to land) is categorically different from the capitalist social relation (bourgeois-proletarian, defined by wage labor and total separation from the means of production). That distinction holds regardless of whether you classify the peasant's land tenure as "ownership" or "customary use-right."

The entire point of primitive accumulation (enclosure, dispossession) was to DESTROY these customary use-rights and force the peasantry off the land, turning them into proletarians who had NO access to means of production and MUST sell their labor power. You know, the process that created the "landlord" class you're so proud of knowing the etymology of. The word "landlord" comes from the feudal system where lords held land. What happened next was that those lords ENCLOSED the commons, expelled the peasants, and converted customary land into private capitalist property. The peasants went from having customary access to means of production to having nothing. That transformation is the birth of capitalism. It is a historically specific, violent process, not a natural evolution from "people trading stuff."

You tried to correct me on feudalism and demonstrated you don't know how feudal land tenure actually worked.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

"Marx's failure to predict how his ideals would be applied"

Marx didn't have "ideals to be applied." He analyzed capitalism's internal dynamics. The USSR calling itself Marxist doesn't make it an application of Marx any more than the Inquisition is an application of the Sermon on the Mount. Marx explicitly refused to write blueprints: "I am not a Marxist," he reportedly said when French "Marxists" began distorting his work during his own lifetime. Blaming Marx for the USSR is blaming Darwin for social Darwinism.

"No, I said Marxism results in central planning. It does."

Third time: cite the passage. Any passage. Anywhere in Marx. Where he describes a centralized planning bureau determining production targets for the economy. You keep asserting this and you keep not citing it because it doesn't exist. "Marxism results in central planning" is a claim about historical regimes that called themselves Marxist. It is not a claim about what Marx wrote. If you're critiquing Marx, critique Marx. If you're critiquing the USSR, say you're critiquing the USSR. These are different critiques.

"Centralization was ongoing, well predicted for 300+ years before Marx."

By whom? Name the theorist who, 300 years before Marx, predicted the concentration and centralization of capital as a structural law of capitalist accumulation and explained the mechanism driving it. Observing "wealth is concentrating" is not the same as explaining WHY. Everyone could see rich people getting richer. Marx explained the mechanism: competition drives smaller capitals to be absorbed by larger ones, credit accelerates this process, surplus value extracted from labor is reinvested to expand production, and the result is the progressive expropriation of many capitalists by few. That is a theoretical explanation of a structural tendency, not a casual observation that "things are centralizing." Nobody before Marx provided the causal mechanism. Predicting the trajectory of a process AND explaining why it happens is different from noticing the process exists.

"Communism itself is unrepentantly utopian."

You're using "utopian" to mean "unrealistic," which is an opinion, not a theoretical critique. In the framework you're engaging with, "utopian" has a specific meaning: designing ideal societies from moral principles rather than analyzing real conditions. Marx's argument is that capitalism's own contradictions produce the conditions for its abolition. You can disagree with that analysis. But calling it "utopian" while using your own private definition of the word, and then accusing me of not knowing "which context" you're using it in, is just using a word wrong and getting upset when someone points it out.

"See, Marx himself predicted further centralization... but Marxism does not hold predictive value."

Read your own sentences. "Marx predicted centralization. But Marxism has no predictive value." You've just acknowledged a successful prediction while claiming there are no successful predictions. In the same paragraph.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

"Utopian: redefining profit as exploiting SLV"

You don't know what "utopian" means in this context. Utopian socialism means designing ideal societies based on moral principles rather than analyzing real conditions (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen). Analyzing profit as surplus value extracted from unpaid labor time is an analytical claim about how capitalism functions. You can disagree with the analysis, but it is not "utopian" by any definition of the word. It's a theory about the source of profit within the existing system, not a blueprint for a future society. Calling an analytical claim "utopian" because you don't like its conclusion is not a rebuttal.

"Central planning: Marx directly advocated against anarchy which he ascribed to capitalism"

Yes, Marx critiqued the "anarchy of production" under capitalism: uncoordinated market production where independent producers make blind decisions leading to overproduction and crisis. His alternative was "freely associated producers" consciously regulating their own production. "Associated producers consciously regulating production" is not "top-down bureaucratic central planning." A workers' cooperative collectively deciding what and how to produce is conscious regulation. Gosplan dictating production quotas from Moscow is central planning. Marx describes the former. The USSR built the latter. Where in Marx does a centralized bureau determine production targets for the entire economy? Cite the passage. You can't, because it doesn't exist. "Opposing anarchy of production" does not equal "advocating central planning" any more than "opposing chaos" equals "advocating dictatorship."

"Centralization was not predicted by Marxist theory"

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25 ("General Law of Capitalist Accumulation") and Chapter 32 ("Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation"). Marx literally, explicitly, in those exact chapters, describes the concentration and centralization of capital as an inherent law of capitalist accumulation. Direct quote, Chapter 32:

"One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale..."

He uses the exact words "centralisation of capital." It is one of the most famous passages in the entire book. If you're going to claim Marx didn't predict centralization of capital, you haven't read Capital, and you are in no position to declare what Marx did or didn't predict.

"Nothing I said was incorrect. Everything you said was."

You said Marx advocated central planning. He didn't. You said his theory has no predictive value. He predicted centralization of capital, which you then claimed he didn't predict, which he explicitly did in a passage so well-known it's taught in introductory economics courses. You called surplus value theory "utopian" while using "utopian" incorrectly. Three claims, three errors.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

There are so many wrong things here that I need to take them one at a time.

"All he did was scrounge up weak justifications for the same utopian ideology."

Name one utopian claim Marx makes. One blueprint for future society. One detailed plan for how communist society should be organized. You can't, because he explicitly refused to do this. He called it "writing recipes for the cookshops of the future." His entire project was the critique of political economy: analyzing how capitalism actually works, not designing an alternative. Capital is 2,500 pages of analysis of the commodity form, money, surplus value, accumulation, and crisis. It is not a programme for a future society.

"Top down bureaucratic central planning"

Marx never advocated central planning. Anywhere. In any text. You are confusing Marx with the Soviet Union. Marx advocated for "an association of free producers" managing production collectively through the commune form (elected recallable delegates, no standing bureaucracy, workers' wages for all public officials). The centralized planning bureaucracy (Gosplan, VSNKh) was a Bolshevik/Stalinist innovation that has nothing to do with Marx's writings. If you're going to critique Marx, critique what he actually wrote, not what a state-capitalist regime did sixty years after his death and stamped his name on.

"Marxism has no predictive value"

Marx predicted: the concentration and centralization of capital (verified: look at any industry's consolidation over the last 150 years), recurring crises of overproduction (verified: 1873, 1893, 1929, 2008), the proletarianization of intermediate classes (verified: the shrinking middle class, the gig economy, the precarity of professional workers), the globalization of production (verified: global supply chains, offshoring, the world market), and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall driving capital toward financialization (verified: the explosive growth of financial instruments relative to productive investment since the 1970s). Meanwhile, Austrian Business Cycle Theory predicted QE would cause hyperinflation. We're still waiting.

"John Locke's & Adam Smith's conceptions of LTV essentially just says 'land is kind of weird, applied labour must be the distinction' and this remains true. Marxists distorted this."

This is a cartoonish reduction of every thinker involved. Locke's LTV is about property rights: you mix labor with nature, therefore you own the product. Smith's LTV is about the measure and source of exchange value: labor is the real price of everything. Ricardo refined it: value is determined by the labor time necessary for production. Marx's LTV is a fundamentally different project from all of them. Marx didn't "dilute" Locke or Smith. He asked a question they never asked: why does the product of labor take the form of a commodity with exchange value in the first place? His analysis of the dual character of the commodity (use-value and exchange-value), the distinction between labor and labor-power, and the derivation of surplus value from unpaid labor time is a theoretical framework none of them built. Marx didn't distort Smith. He critiqued Smith, showed where Smith's analysis broke down (Smith couldn't explain profit as anything other than a "deduction from the product of labor" without explaining why workers accept this deduction), and provided the answer (workers sell their labor-power, not their labor; the difference between the value of labor-power and the value labor produces is surplus value). Saying Marx "distorted" LTV is like saying Einstein "distorted" Newton. He identified the limitations and built a more comprehensive framework.

"Austrian economics is explicitly upfront about being theoretical reasoning."

Being honest about your methodology doesn't make your methodology correct. I can honestly tell you I derive all my knowledge from reading tea leaves. My honesty doesn't validate the tea leaves.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

Marx spent twenty years in the British Museum reading factory inspection reports, trade statistics, Blue Books (Parliamentary investigation records), wage data, price histories, and demographic surveys before publishing Capital. Capital's footnotes cite hundreds of empirical sources: real wages, real working hours, real mortality rates, real profit rates, real industrial output. The labor theory of value wasn't "divined" and then justified with data. It was developed through critical engagement with classical political economy (Smith, Ricardo) and tested against the empirical record of industrial capitalism.

Marx literally criticized the utopian socialists for doing exactly what you're accusing him of: starting with a narrative ("society should be fair") and then looking for justification. His entire methodological break was the move FROM narrative/moral critique TO empirical analysis of capitalism's actual internal dynamics. That's what "scientific socialism" means as opposed to "utopian socialism": deriving conclusions from the analysis of real conditions rather than from moral ideals.

Meanwhile, Austrian economics explicitly claims its conclusions are derived from the action axiom through pure deduction and that empirical data cannot disprove them. Gabriel, in this very thread, said "data can't contradict theory" and "economics is not an empirical science." If either framework fits your description of "a narrative divined first and justified later," it's the one that openly refuses to let data challenge its conclusions. Marx revised his framework repeatedly based on new evidence (the 1872 Manifesto Preface revising the political programme based on the Commune's experience, the multiple drafts of Capital incorporating new data). Austrians proudly declare their framework immune to empirical revision. Tell me which one is the unfalsifiable narrative.

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

"Whether that counts as 'science' depends on how broadly one defines the word."

Thank you for the concession. The rest of us use the standard definition: a method for producing knowledge about reality that is subject to testing and revision. If your framework cannot be tested or revised, you've admitted it occupies an ambiguous epistemological category that might not be science. That's my entire point.

"Economic data are too complex and context-dependent and cannot override logically derived principles."

Climate data is also complex and context-dependent. Epidemiological data is also complex and context-dependent. Evolutionary biology data is also complex and context-dependent. None of these fields respond to complexity by abandoning empirical testing and retreating to pure deduction. They develop better statistical methods, better natural experiments, and better controls. "The data is messy" is an argument for better empirical methods, not for no empirical methods.

"Cannot override logically derived principles of human behavior."

If your "logically derived principles" predict X and the world consistently produces not-X, then either your logic contains hidden premises that are wrong, or your axioms don't map onto reality. Saying "the data is wrong, my logic is right" when the data contradicts you is the definition of dogmatism. Ptolemaic astronomers said the same thing about epicycles when observations didn't match. "The logic is sound, the observations must be wrong." It took Galileo pointing a telescope at Jupiter to end that.

"Monetary expansion can smooth cycles; it cannot manufacture prosperity."

This is a substantive economic claim that is empirically testable. You just made a falsifiable prediction about the real world. Should we test it with data, or does data not count because economics isn't an empirical science?

[Nick @NickL4D2_Bot]

"That was an example of an empirical observation and that then led to deductions. I didn't say all economics works like that."

Your original claim, verbatim: "Data can't contradict theory. Economics is not an empirical science." Now you're saying some starting points ARE empirical but the deductions from them aren't subject to empirical testing. So: empirical premises lead to deductions, but the deductions can never be checked against empirical reality? If your premises are drawn from observation and your conclusions are supposed to explain the same reality those observations came from, then your conclusions MUST be checkable against that reality. You can't take data IN and refuse data OUT. That's not a methodology. That's a one-way valve.

"The theory here is marginal utility. Is your claim that marginal utility is not true or useless?"

My claim is specific: the Austrian deductive derivation of diminishing marginal utility does not work as pure deduction because it smuggles in empirical premises. You said: "you act toward your most urgent end first, so additional units of the same good must be less valuable." I gave you four counterexamples where additional units are NOT less valuable: (1) you need 4 tires for one car, the 4th is as urgent as the 1st, (2) the second shoe is more valuable than the first, (3) network effects (each additional phone increases the value of all phones), (4) addiction (subjective valuation of additional units increases). You responded to zero of them. Either address them or concede that "additional units must be less valuable" is not a logical necessity but an empirical generalization that holds in some cases and fails in others. If it holds in some cases and fails in others, it requires empirical testing to determine when and where it applies. Which means it's an empirical claim, not an a priori truth.

"Economic phenomena are events that occur in specific points in time."

No they aren't. A business cycle unfolds over years. Price formation involves repeated interactions across time. Trade requires production, transport, and exchange across time. Capital accumulation spans decades. Inflation is measured over periods. If your framework applies only to one person's preference ranking at one frozen instant, then to explain any of these phenomena you need to aggregate across persons and across time. Aggregation requires assumptions about how individual preferences interact (do they cancel out? compound? conflict?) and how they persist over time (are they stable enough to produce predictable patterns?). Those assumptions are empirical. You cannot get from "one person at one instant" to "market phenomena" without empirical claims about aggregation and persistence. So either your framework explains only individual frozen snapshots (in which case it can't explain economic phenomena), or it makes additional empirical assumptions to bridge the gap (in which case it's subject to empirical testing).

Which is it?