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Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

That is the entire Marx's Das Kapital. The main argument being free market will lead to concentration of power and then capitalism collaspe. He expanded on what he thought the not-capitalism could be.

Then Lenin concluded that if you will always have concentration of power and some folks doing centralized planning, it might well be the state.

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"Then Lenin concluded that if you will always have concentration of power and some folks doing centralized planning, it might well be the state."

This is exactly where things are heading.

Theres no need for firms anymore at the extreme - the govt can own all.

And ever since that and the supposedly marginalist “revolution” people keep pretending their sliced up tautological economics is a science separated from politics because it’s convenient to those who wield capital. Truth is Marx might’ve not made the best case for the general law of profit equalization and presented the transformation of value to price in the best of mathematical terms, but I’ll be damned if the empirical evidence makes up for everything he missed.

Marx was extremely simple minded when it came to human nature. That’s the problem with all utopian ideas and all idealistic philosophers and economists: the assumption is always that humans will behave in some idealised way. While in reality greed, cruelty, corruption, treating other humans as inhuman or slaves is part of human nature. Not the only part of course, but probably the most important part when looking at the very long list of disaster we call history.

Crazy how historically wrong Das Kapital is as a book. The labor theory of value has done enormous amounts of damage to humans world-wide with its lies. Watching Marx turn himself into pretzels to explain how to calculate the "Socially necessary labor time" is entertaining if it didn't have the baggage of motivating dozens of horrible, no good revolutions, useless, damaging revolutions.

If you want a good starting point book for an alternative to traditional capitalism and with a focus on the commons with none of this baggage, I highly recommend Henry George (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George) and "Progress and Poverty" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty) as it is a head-and-shoulders better read.

Until we have true AGI there is no value without labor. The shares of Amazon that make Bezos so rich would be worthless without the 1.5 million people working for it.

That's certainly an opinion... Quite a lot of condemnation for no real argument. I personally think surplus value and socially necessary labor time are quite straightforward, intuitive concepts. Meanwhile, I found this tidbit on Henry George's wikipedia page: "Upon Marx's death, George admitted he has not read any of his works, which were untranslated into English at the time,"

For anyone interested in reading more from Marx's side, Wage Labour And Capital by Marx is a pamphlet meant for mass distribution and not a difficult read. I've heard A People's Guide To Capitalism recommended as a high quality modernized version of the same ideas.

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