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Comment by nvm0n2 | Hacker News Reader

This is deeply confusing. I said:

> because everyone's "need" is the same. Maybe adjusted by a few exceptions like family size

And the parts of Marx you quote say literally that exact thing: that people's needs vary only depending on whether they are married, how many children they have "and so on and so forth".

In other words Marx didn't recognize any connection between quantity or quality of work and what you get back. In a Marxist system your income is a function of family size. Indeed Marx didn't even recognize the concept of "work smarter not harder" because he believed everyone's work was exactly the same and the only difference was that big strong men could deliver more units of abstract "labor" per hour than a small weedy sick man.

Why do you think your quotes dispute what I said? Is it not perfect support for it?

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It really doesn't do that. He was giving examples of how people's needs changed, to critique people who said that everyone's needs are the same. As I said, this where he disagreed with many leftists, and the name of the text is "Critique of..."

The next quote literally says that some are better or work more and therefore the right to one's work is a right to unequality.

If you want the full context, read the full text. It's not so long. Otherwise, you have to trust me for the context and not imagine one.

You are wrong. Even in Das Capital Marx comments that there are simpler labor and complex labor. You could think in a complex labor producing more value than a simpler one, in exchange of the worker needing more salary for compensating more time needed for its education and fomation. However, this changes almost nothing for the model and main argument presented in Das Capital, therefore, for most part he just simplified the model assuming that all labor was a simple one.

Marxism is incoherent so debating it is largely pointless, but in the quotes above he clearly defines labor as a "standardized unit" which differs only in duration and intensity. This is nonsense so it's not surprising he later tried to walk it back a bit, but as you note, that was half-hearted at best and he usually treated labor as if it were something like coal.

In reality there's already a standardized unit which sums up the worth of a person's labor (money) and a standardized way to compute it (the market). Marx didn't like what that system computed and argued strongly that it all be swept away and replaced with some notion of "need" (family size) and "ability" (simple hours worked or intensity of those hours) which is drastically too simple to reflect reality. That's why his ideas led to collapse everywhere they were tried.

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