Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

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Value being subjective and fluid is exactly what makes modern society function. I may value having lots of children. You may value not having lots of children. Expecting there to be an objective universal value on everything is a fool's errand.

I trade my time at work to sit at a comfy desk and type for money, and that is work. And I will negotiate for more time and money so that I may spend more time lifting heavy things at a gym. Funnily enough that is leisure and it costs me money. It is in the asymmetry of needs that we create excess value by working for each other taking care of the things they do not want to do for themselves.

Labor theory makes no sense in how people actually choose to go about their lives. Which is why modern economics is so focused on how to just maximise as much generic utility out of a market. And it is usually Marxists who are actually the most obsessed about counting up the little green slips of paper that don't mean anything.

You reference Hegel, but it is specifically his idea that progress is inevitable. Which is exactly why I reject Marx. Marx believed that making functioning plans was useless since progress was inevitable once unleashed. But Marx was a leech who counted on his friends for his subsistence and others to actually test his ideas. Progress is only made by intentional and planned efforts to deal with problems rather than just criticize and shake your fist at society.

> Marx believed that making functioning plans was useless since progress was inevitable once unleashed.

Marx believed that planning out the detailed structure of a future utopian society, in the tradition of Owen or Fourier, was useless. And he was right. Societies are not and have never been the product of intentional design: no individual has the necessary power, no group has the necessary agency. They're the accretion, year after year, of millions of independent agents doing the best they can with the constraints the past has imposed on them. We can adjust the constraints, to some extent, and maybe aim, very imprecisely, at some desired end state, but we don't get to skip straight there.

Okay, but this is not at all what Marx himself said. Marx was philosophically opposed in all of his writings to answering even the most basic questions about what a communist economy/government would look like. In his mind he was only proclaiming the inevitability of such a system. In fact, he regularly dismissed anyone who asked these types of questions as serving the bourgeoisie.

But it turns out that, after a socialist revolution, who is going to make the bread and who is going to distribute it is not a problem that will inevitably be solved.

> Okay, but this is not at all what Marx himself said. Marx was philosophically opposed in all of his writings to answering even the most basic questions about what a communist economy/government would look like. In his mind he was only proclaiming the inevitability of such a system.

No, the point is that he's not talking about a particular system. The famous soundbite from The German Ideology:

> Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Communism, for Marx, is the thing that beats capitalism, and he's only willing to make claims about it that he thinks follow from that. He believes it will lack the features of capitalism that undermine its long term stability, and do a better job than capitalism of accomplishing the things that a mode of production needs to do to win out over others (namely, producing things), but anything more than that cannot be predicted decades-to-centuries out. Things will need to be administered, but they're not going to be administered by him, or in circumstances he can predict.

Consider feudalism. An educated Frenchman in 1700 could reasonably think that feudalism was on the way out, that it would probably mean the displacement of the aristocracy by the emerging bourgeoisie, that it would not have a patchwork legal system built out of a thousand years of accumulated hereditary agreements and local precedent, that it would professionalize government to some degree, that it would do a better job of maintaining a professional military, and so on. But they had no chance whatsoever of predicting the structure of the Federal Reserve, and it would be insane of them to claim otherwise.

Consider that Marx wasn't Marxist-Leninist although I think he was pro state. Anti-statist socialists like Kropotkin thought about some kind of decentralised planning. You could even have market as a distribution mechanism, but without capitalism through some variant of market socialism or market Anarchism.

> But it turns out that, after a socialist revolution, who is going to make the bread and who is going to distribute it is not a problem that will inevitably be solved.

Marx was, I think, of a very different mind about revolution than many of his later followers: I suspect that to Marx, a “socialist revolution” was more like the Industrial Revolution and less like the French (or, perhaps more to the point, Russian) Revolution.

Marx wasn't against providing concrete steps addressing coherent real issues adapted to the conditions in particular places (see the program for the German Communists that is often presented as an appendix to the Communist Manifesto). But the utopian end-state society was, in Marx’s view, rather far off.

This is exactly right, and Marx opposed revolutionary efforts in pre-industrial Russia (e.g. the Russian Revolution). He did advocate Russian support of revolution in Germany, but saw no use in revolution in pre-capitalist society.

> Marx believed that making functioning plans was useless since progress was inevitable

You're taking ideas out of your pants and putting on Marx's mouth. At least be honest and say you never read him and hate his ideas without knowing what they are.

I have read Marx. Much more than most Marxists. Have you?

The closest he got to describing a post-capitalist state was the very bleak "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" concept.

Of course I did, in no point he suggests that planning is useless.

I find the subjective argument too abstract for practical use. All the subjectivity in the world must come to head with reality and how it can be enforced in reality. I am of the opinion that logistics wins wars, and labor theory of value, with its flaws, is able to provide a sense of direction for me to act on. Maybe I can bet on an asymmetry of needs with someone wanting to raise a family with me if I was unemployed and they did all the work, but I have the impression that a partner would appreciate me being able to help with the work too.

> Marx believed that making functioning plans was useless since progress was inevitable once unleashed.

Excuse me? The overwhelming majority of Marx's published work was literally advocacy of concrete plans.

See his work with the International Workingmen's Association for some of the most well-known letters and articles arguing for explicit political positions and concrete labor actions: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/iwma/index....

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