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Der_Einzigetoday at 5:00 PM2 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

UltraSanetoday at 5:09 PM

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.

0x262dtoday at 5:11 PM

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.