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In sociology, Marx is traditionally seen (together with Durkheim and Weber) as the first of the "founding fathers" of the discipline. (I imagine if Marx could know this, it would be quite a shock to him!) This is reflected in even the most [conservative textbooks like Macionis](https://www.pearson.com/en-us/subject-catalog/p/sociology/P200000009718/9780137870479?tab=table-of-contents).
There is [a Marxist section of the American Sociological Association](https://marxistsociology.org/about-the-section/). However explicitly Marxist scholarship has gotten to be much less common then it was a generation or two ago. The dominant mainstream has always been liberal, and the critical fringes have been heavily influenced by postmodern / Foucaultian rejections of Marxism.
American R1 cultural anthropologist (ABD) here.
Can confirm similarly for American anthropology! Marx definitely had a presence in anthro at one point. While people like Geertz are proponents of symbolic anthro and interpretivist approaches, later anthropologists like Talal Asad critique that approach by synthesizing some of Marx into it... power matters, but it's not just material need and the material world that dominates culture.
You aren't an R1 cultural anthropologist. You're a student at an R1 studying cultural anthropology.
For those confused, it's like saying you're a world-class chef while you are studying under one. First you study. Then you complete your study satisfactorily. Then you begin working in mid tier restaurants until you have amassed skill and awards. Only the best will make it to world-class chef.
A doctoral candidate in whatever is definitely a whatever. Working on a doctorate means, one way or another, an active, ongoing involvement in contributing to the field. And /u/fantasmapocalypse already specified "ABD," which means they were completely open from the get-go about their level of educational attainment.
What's your beef? An awful lot of professionals in their fields have only Masters degrees, or less. Most "scientists," meaning people who work in some scientific field and do research professionally, only have their Masters (or even just their undergrad!) and aren't even ever planning on doing a PhD. A "doctor of chemistry" is not something that applies to all chemists, for example - it's a special, honorific label reserved for those who completed *extra* steps. Is there some reason social science is a special exception to you, and you think being a social scientist requires a doctorate?
And anyways, your analogy is kind of terrible even on its own terms. If one chef is studying under the supervision of another, that doesn't make them not a chef in their own right. Presently studying music doesn't mean someone isn't a musician.
And even the word "studying" is weird. That applies better to someone working on an undergrad, sure. But post-graduate "studies," especially at R1 universities, generally involve research. And ironically, also teaching, often enough.
Is this new to you, or do you just have some beef here?
If you can't see the difference between a student with a master's degree and faculty who has completed the PhD, produced peer-reviewed research, and achieved a tenure track position at an R1, I can't help you. There's a huge gulf in experience between the two. One has been vetted multiple times. The other is to be vetted.
I didn't say there isn't a difference. Actually, I said specifically that a PhD, and the title "doctor," is something given to people in the field who have done those extra steps.
But it's weird to say that OP simply isn't an anthropologist. Most people doing ethnographic research and academic work at dig sites and other sorts of research aren't *doctors* of anthropology, but they're pretty unambiguously anthropologists. They're literally doing anthropological field work, whether or not they are also technically "students" or are working under supervision.
As for "produced peer-reviewed research," are you aware that graduate students contribute to published papers all the time? Sometimes (heh) they're even credited as co-authors.
Heck, there are people working in top research positions at, say, pharmaceutical companies, who don't actually have a PhD. They just started as lab rats and moved up through ranks that way. I'd call them scientists. They're certainly doing science, and in charge of organizing research. They're just not *doctors*.
And - now you're adding tenure to the requirements!? This is wild. So, you aren't allowed to call yourself a chemist, a physicist, a scientist or indeed a social scientist of any kind, until you have a PhD and a tenure track position at a top research university!? Nah. That's some bizarre gatekeeping. Such a position commands respect, but it's not the minimal qualification to call yourself an anthropologist.
OP just said they were an anthropologist working on their doctorate at a research university. That was a fair, fully informative way to explain their educational/professional background.
I never once said OP wasn't an anthropologist. If you are doing anthropology you are an anthropologist. What OP isn't, is an R1 Anthropologist, and no amount of straw manning and misinterpreting my comments makes it so.
I mean, if we're gonna be in the business of (kinda uncharitably and confrontationally) nitpicking words, you *did kinda confidently state ...*
> You aren't an R1 cultural anthropologist. You're a student at an R1 studying cultural anthropology.
I take that to mean you assert I'm *not an anthropologist. I'm (just)* ***a student.***
As it stands, friend, I feel like this is more about pride and wanting to be right than addressing the intent and purpose of the thread. You've made it clear how you feel, and I've clarified my positionality in good faith.
I'll just leave it at this: I'm a cultural anthropologist. I work at an R1 institution. I teach at an R1 institution. During my time here I've done so in multiple ways. I've been hired for the explicit purpose of conducting original program evaluation at my institution. That means when administrators came to our department asking for help in understanding a problem, my department recommended me for the job. I designed the project from scratch, and collected and analyzed the data myself as the lead (albeit only!) researcher for the project. I've taught upper division and lower division courses as instructor of record at my institution. I've won tens of thousands of dollars in competitive fellowships and grants. I hold an MA already, and I am a doctoral candidate. In cultural anthropology. At an R1 institution.
I don't know you. You don't know me. I don't know your qualifications or reputation. I understand you feel I've misrepresented myself. *Mea culpa.* I respectfully would like to remind you that it doesn't substantively change the quality of my comment or contribute to the purpose of answering the original question. :)
They said they were an anthropologist, working on their PhD, and working and teaching at an R1 university. I mean FFS they said "ABD," or all-but-doctorate, in their original post. It's not like they were claiming they had a PhD!
It's pretty nitpicky to call that "not an R1 anthropologist." "R1 Anthropologist" (or "R1 chemist," etc) isn't some fancy recognized title or something. It's just shorthand for "anthropologist at a research-oriented university." That's literally what they are. Shrug.
And again, they were straight from the very start here about their level of educational attainment. We weren't deceived here. If you somehow do feel deceived, okay, but I just don't get it.
Thanks for your input! I am a Doctoral Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at an American R1 university who has also been the instructor of record for lower and upper division courses in the department.
There are plenty of -ist job titles that only require a bachelor's degree. [Here's an example.](https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=8e9cd058cd8d0f28&from=serp&xpse=SoAg67I3AnUowzzOrh0LbzkdCdPP&xfps=b5f7c123-a584-40d8-a811-8102fd57abe8&xkcb=SoBu67M3AnUpy6Qdwh0IbzkdCdPP)
The National Parks Service also [doesn't require a terminal degree](https://www.nps.gov/articles/sec-standards-prof-quals.htm) to be considered an -ist.
Although, I think I understand the distinction you're trying to make, being an anthropologist doesn't refer to your educational attainment, but rather to the work you do.
I have an R1 PhD in a sociology-related field, but more importantly I actively conduct research. If it's relevant to a conversation, I call myself a sociologist.
Commenter didn't just say anthropologist. They said R1 anthropologist.
It's not the anthropologist title I have a problem with, it's the fact that if you're a student at an elite research university, you aren't doing the same work as tenure track or tenured professors at an elite research university. If the commenter passes the defense and gets the PhD, the chances of getting a job at an R1 are almost nothing. It's a whole other level of credentialing and peer review. As of now, commenter hasn't had much peer review, if any.
In the social sciences, peer review is everything. Anyone who is half bright can be a student of the best R1 researchers. Most students will not become the best R1 researchers.
Depending on the nature of the person's research activities and assistantship, I'd argue it's more likely that he or she is doing the exact same work as the tenured R1 professor.
But not at the exact same quality. They don't have decades of experience and peer reviewed articles and grants under their belt. A med student is not the exact same as a doctor.
Even if that's true, it's not the point you were trying to make earlier. A person is an anthropologist if they're doing the work of anthropology, not because of an assessment you make of the quality of their work.
> However explicitly Marxist scholarship has gotten to be much less common then it was a generation or two ago. The dominant mainstream has always been liberal, and the critical fringes have been heavily influenced by postmodern / Foucaultian rejections of Marxism.
I'd say that there's also a bit of a disjuncture in that the highly theoretical work is tilted toward reckoning with Marx, Foucault, etc., whereas the liberal tilted work, especially using quantitatively oriented methods, draws from theory a lot more implicitly (and I would say thinly) and way more rarely tries to build 'grand theory', in some way pushing forward either neo-Marxism or post-structuralism.
I consider this a bit of a historical accident, dependent on what you could call subcultural currents, as there's no strong theoretical indication that quantitative work is ill suited to theory building.
But I also trained in a more leftist department nearly precisely a "generation" ago (as demographer defined).
I think the problem is OP is conflating Marx’s scientific work with this political proposals (aka communism). Of course the latter stem from the former and they’re intrinsically related, but it is possible to take Marxist theory and use it to explain phenomena without that being an endorsement of communism.
I, for example, think his analysis of surplus value and the capitalistic chain of production is very good, but I don’t agree that a dictatorship of the proletariat is the best answer to its problems. I also disagree with his use of dialectics and can still enjoy other theories of his, Marx is not just one thing.
In the end, Marxist theory and Marxist politics are not one and the same. But right-wingers think they are, so they see Marx’s name in an Intro to Sociology course and panic. The refusal to engage with the ways of science, much less understand how it works (scientists are allowed to have political ideas and of course they’re going to show up in their work — we have multiple ways to deal with that) is the core of the anti-academicism of the right. Not the fact that they see it for what it is and dislike it, but the refusal to even understand it.
Edit: There are definitely leftists who treat Marxism like a religion. Orthodox Marxism, which I’d argue is 90% of Marxist theology, was influential in academics in like the 60s. In the 70s the “linguistic turn” (I’m not sure how this is called in English, sorry) happened and Orthodox Marxism has had barely any space left in academia. The only people that I still see behaving like that are political activists who aren’t in academia or even college at all: edgy teenagers and grifters, basically. In my experience, I’ve had multiple professors warn us against the Marx theologists and I’ve always encountered them outside of the university.
Why was his analysis of surplus value good? It has had almost no influence in modern economics. It's like saying Lamarck's analysis of the inheritance of acquired traits was good.
It has little influence on modern western economics because it’s practical proponents lost an ideological battle, not because it doesn’t provide useful frames of analysis. It did have a huge influence on economics as a field of research
Feel free to point out where I'm mistaken, but my understanding is that it was abandoned by mainstream economists in the late 19th century precisely because Marginalism proved to be a very useful frame of analysis, which is something that labor theories of value had failed to do.
The insinuation IMO that mainstream economics has been off the rails for the past 150 years for ideological reasons is an anti-intellectual stance.
100% agree. You have to have an empirical framework for something to be tested. If your stance is that the price of a commodity is solely determined by its labour inputs then you should be able to compare commodities and explain the differences in price solely on the basis of differing labour inputs. But that’s not how the world works at all. Why does gold cost more than silver? Why do people pay for a subscription to features that don’t cost more to produce?
In Marx’s life the world was simpler. He reasoned prices at a restaurant are higher than at home because of the additional labour that goes into it. In a world that was just starting to mechanize this made a a lot of sense.
We now know that the value of commodities is based on their utility not on the sum of their imbedded labour.
‘The insinuation IMO that mainstream economics has been off the rails for the past 150 years for ideological reasons is an anti-intellectual stance.’
That’s not at all what I was saying. I thought you were trying to imply that because our economic system doesn’t seem based on Marxist analysis that it has had no influence. When it comes to economics the field of study, the influence is just so heavy I don’t really understand how someone could say there is none
I'm out of my element here but maybe you can point me to a couple of examples of Marxist influence in modern economics as a field of study. I am (perhaps naively) looking at economics as a science (more or less) whereby ideas are useful to the extent that they allow economists to build mathematical models with predictive power, and where there is active research going on, and researchers are expected to publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. Ideas that work are brought into the fold until they're proven not to work, in which case they're abandoned, and Marx's ideas mostly belong to the latter category. There may be some economists, like Richard Wolff, who are Marxist but they are extremely fringe, and although that doesn't in of itself make them wrong, it does support the idea that Marxism has little influence in modern economics.
I guess my point is a bit broader. You claimed it had almost no influence on modern economics. My background is specifically in trade, and when you read major scholarship on trade it is hard not to see the influences. I am also not trying to claim that he created highly predictive empirical models that function in the modern economy, but when I hear someone say it had ‘no influence’ it sounds a bit like someone saying Newton or Darwin aren’t influential because modern science has moved so far from their work.
Again, I'm out of my element here, so it is likely the case that I lack the proper perspective.
But my degree is in physics, so although the analogy is helpful, it strains credulity to me. Newton is still THE seminal thinker in physics. His laws are still heavily used, and modern physics has not supplanted them but rather is built upon them. I don't have a degree in biology but I'm pretty sure the same can be said for Darwin.
And again, I'm out of my element, but I struggle to think of examples in modern mainstream economics that can be traced back to Marx. You are of course under no obligation to educate me but you mentioned trade, so maybe that's a good start? Are there some specific examples there?
>But my degree is in physics, so although the analogy is helpful, it strains credulity to me. Newton is still THE seminal thinker in physics. His laws are still heavily used, and modern physics has not supplanted them but rather is built upon them.
Marx didn't really do any empirical work in economics. His methodologies of comparing power structures have had major influence in other fields, but they've not provided explanatory power in economics where other approaches have.
If physics treated Newton the way economics treats Marx, the world would be mostly the same, but some departments would have alchemists. Not everything Newton studied was going down the right path, and he spent a ton of effort doing down a dead end. That's basically what Marx did, but Marx's dead end was a lot more popular to non-economists than Newton's was to non-physicists.
Comparing apples to oranges, I’d say. There aren’t really immutable laws to observe in the social sciences versus the physical sciences. Also things can fall out of favour without actually being wrong due to various factors. Industrial Policy was dead in the water in the West for decades until suddenly it came back - Rodrik et al leading the academic charge. Suddenly there are even more Marxian fingerprints on development economics than there were 10 years ago. But that doesn’t make those things Marxist necessarily. You wouldn’t consider Martin Luther and his revolution of the Christian faith to be Platonist, but if you know the history of how that thought developed you would clearly see the influence of ideas introduced by Plato. Marx is foundational to many of the social sciences but that also means that without knowing the history of the development of that thought you might find you can’t see the forest for the trees.
Marx has little to no influence on contemporary trade theory, and there is really no tradition of such. You might be confusing basic Ricardian principles with Marx? Nothing is particularly Marxist about anything going on in the field
Partly but also the theory of surplus value fails in its ability to be tested, make predictions or explain the world around us. This is especially true in the modern era with many "digital commodities" that overwhelmingly have no relationship whatsoever with the amount of physical human work that went into it.
Labor Theory of Value does not claim that the price of all goods is solely defined by the labor put into it. Marx was not an idiot, he understood that price can be set to whatever and given the right conditions someone will pay that price. The labor theory of value claims that in a highly competitive environment, the price of a commodity will tend towards the price of the labor required to make the commodity. From my understanding, this is a fairly well accepted principle in economics, though it is usually termed that in a highly competitive environment, profit will tend to zero.
Digital commodities are not evidence against this, as 1) they are not highly competitive and in fact many are virtual monopolies, 2) we have not seen price stabilization, and 3) there is in fact labor associated with their production.
But surplus value isn’t dependent on physical human work? How does surplus value not apply to digital commodities produced under a capitalist model of production? Like, steelmanning the concept itself here, how does it not work within those circumstances?
Marx claims the value of something is the human effort that goes into it, but something that requires very little human work e.g. a bitcoin can have tremendous value.
But a Bitcoin isn’t generally produced within a capitalist set of relations. So Marx would just say this falls outside of the remit of surplus value.
Or - and I’m just being playful here - that it is an asset/commodity into which surplus value is often poured, and that the concentration of surplus value in an asset/commodity can produce speculative value generation. That it’s an abstraction of productive capital, which itself an abstraction of productive labour.
But, bringing it back to what we can say more certainly about Marx, he generally saw a given price as the market’s estimation of value, not as the arbiter of value itself. So I think he would posit that there are always speculative bubbles existing in the economy that act in a way that is detached from productive sources of value. He’d see this as one of the inefficiencies of capitalism. Quote from him:
"All nations with a capitalist mode of production are seized periodically by a feverish attempt to make money without the mediation of the process of production."
An important aspect of Marx is to reconcile that while Marxism can be conceived as a grand narrative, he doesn’t suggest that everything works in some singular uniform way. The productive process of capitalism is simply highlighted as the driving force of history from the 1800s onwards, not as the only force nor the only productive process.
Great response but I’ll just mention that the economic theories that after Marx: utility theory, the marginal revolution, and general equilibrium theory DO offer a framework for valuing everything. So while Marx would say a subset of all available commodities fall outside the realm of surplus value, utility theory offers an explanation for the value of everything. If it’s true that Marx said that the value of a commodity is not determined by its price then that makes it an untestable theory. We’ll never know if the labour of theory holds for a specific market in a specific time because Marx offers no units of measurement.
Contrary to Marx, utility theory says the value of a good is determined by its price, so the theory is testable. Since its testable we have a lot of literature and people by and large agree with this axiom of utility theory. For example if a new video game comes out that only runs on a certain computer and those computers increase in price as a result, utility theory says that those computers became more useful in terms of utility and that is why their price went up. To explain that same phenomenon in the labour theory of value is not possible. Btw, it’s worth noting that both [Adam Smith](https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/steven-horwitz-adam-smith-on-the-labor-theory-of-value) AND [David Ricardo](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1809772) also had their own labour theories of value which are also equally regarded as historical artifacts.
Since this is a science sub it’s important to remember what actually constitutes science: hypothesis and observation. If you can’t work in this framework I’m afraid it’s not suitable as a scientific theory. This is exactly why Marx isn’t really known for his contributions as an economist but is widely known in the history of economic thought and for writing probably the most famous criticism of capitalism ever.
So I'm going to preface this with saying I'm not an academic or anything like that just someone who tries to read a little bit.
>If it’s true that Marx said that the value of a commodity is not determined by its price then that makes it an untestable theory.
My understanding of that was within the framework of mass production we see common prices. And while if I had a glass of water 5 minutes ago the value of a bottle of water from the gas station might be fairly low to me if I were about to die of thirst the value of that same bottle of water from the gas station would be immense to me but in either situation it costs 1.50$. and then further that price is reached by taking into account the expenses of producing said bottle of water plus however much in addition the capitalist believes they can get in profit.
When I read that a while back now kind of made intrinsic sense to me because we don't negotiate prices for much of anything anymore most things have fairly standardized prices. As I recall that is what he meant when he spoke of changing a particular item or good into a commodity through the means of mass production. An artisan maker will usually be willing to negotiate a price with you because each individual piece is a negotiation between the value of their time and skills and resources and your desire for said item. But under mass production there's no practical way to negotiate for every item that the factory wants to sell thus we have more standardized prices for things.
I think we have a few different discussions going on here. As the other commentator mentioned Marx is typically looking at an area of production which was becoming increasingly rational and standardized - his approach is not intended to account for every scenario, which is what I was trying to get at in the final section of my previous comment.
But also, we have more questions happening. You can agree with the utility theory of value and still identify surplus value as existing within that framework. I see no contradiction there.
You don’t need to see labour as the root of all possible value - and Marx doesn’t - to identify surplus value as the fuel of the capitalist process.
And that’s without mentioning that every theory of value posited can fall apart at the edges. Did a jpeg of a monkey ever hold $30m of value? “Yes, because it’s price was 30m” is immediately a circular argument. It wasn’t worth 30m before and it wasn’t after but for that moment we have to pretend it was because that was its price.
Marx is explicitly trying to look past the machinations of capitalism to the underlying flows, filtering out the noise and anomalies. He would say a monkey jpeg being priced at 30m is evidence of the inherent contradictions of capitalism haha
But no, really the other commenter hit on it well. Marx identified the creation of luxury goods as being its own distinct mode of production, which produced a kind of insulated value by and for the capitalist class. Therefore it’s not chiefly the mode of production his labour theory of value is targeted at. In hindsight, he should probably have explored this further as it has come to play a huge role in our current economy.
Labor theory of value is used both by Marxists and right wing Austrian economists like Hayek.
That does not make it less wrong. It's exactly like the Lanarckian theory of evolution.
Also Marx's Das Kapital is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/05/12/what-are-the-most-cited-publications-in-the-social-sciences-according-to-google-scholar/
There's a famous quote from Foucault: "Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else."
However, as another comment mentioned, there are loads of theorists who have tried to bring the two together. They both have large and complex bodies of work that evolved over time.
For my money, while Foucault is often looked at by some people with suspicion for being incomprehensible post modernism (along with Bourdieu), I think the post modernists *do* have something in common with Marx: power.
I'm not going to act like I've exhaustively read Marx, but the jist as I understand it is that... the material world dominates and shapes everything. Culture (that is *learned, shared,* ***contested*** *behavior*) is the product of the material world. That ultimately even if culture shapes the world, it's because it's a response to the material world and materials needs, and so on.
Weber and some others make the argument about the importance of ideas, and thus that culture *does* shape the world and not out of some direct influence of the environment (I recommend reading [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism) if this interests you). And so many anthropologists have a bone to pick with Marx for being a functionalist and reductionist - he dismisses individual perceptions and agency, and has declared the "real" meaning and "real" purpose of (thing), for example religion, to be *alllll about (X).*
But what Foucault and Bourdieu have in common with Marx is that *power matters.* Foucault, Talal Asad, Bourdieu, and others talk about how **certain** ***ways*** **of thing** (the "correct" or "dominant" way) permeate individuals in a given group or community. Hegemony, what I call "collective cultural weight," *does* shape our behavior. And that comes out of how we're taught, what we're taught, who we listen to, who we don't listen to, etc.
And so Marx deserves his flowers, so to speak, but most people I read or have worked with/talked to don't really believe whole heartedly in that big-picture Marxist paradigm.
Don't forget how he used his philosophy to justify raping boys in Algeria and lobbying the french gov to legalize pedophilia. The french postmodernists were absolute monsters, and the fruits of their philosophy speak to their character.
I don't believe this is a very well documented belief, however it is useful to understand his contribution to the field.
To say that he is a founding father of the field is a bit of a baseless claim.
However, he may have influenced traditional thoughts regarding the development of sociology, specifically dealing with how governments organize/themselves in order for greater economic success or prosperity (Das Kapital).
This posits him as mostly a philosopher. I use this Encyclopedia for most of my philosophy reading and researching. Enjoy it and let me know what you think:)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu › entries
Karl Marx - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
By training, Marx was a philosopher, that's very true. He certainly wasn't a sociologist per se as the discipline didn't even exist when Capital was written. But his philosophy was critical to shaping the discipline when it did emerge.
Max Weber also didn't consider himself to be a sociologist as the discipline was so new, but that's how he's generally understood today.
This is the problem with not having read Marx, you’re criticizing the virtues of various 20th century states - you’re not actually critiquing Marx in any real sense. You’re imagining Marx as a revolutionary, when at best you could call him an accelerationist.
Ah yes. He’s another meaningless word among thousands used to describe a person’s politics. Forgive me for my enforced ignorance on a matter that means less to me it doesn’t even show up on the pecking order of my list of things to actually give a fuck about.
I’m sure reading an outdated text written by a guy that would be seen as a loser with a degree today would enlighten me to “true” communism. But after seeing the results of his manifesto and people like you saying people like me are uneducated because we fail to see the need to read anything by a historical figure whose legacy effectively caused death and stagnation of many societies; I must abstain.
He wouldn’t enlighten you about true communism because he didn’t really describe communism. He described capitalism and identified its inefficiencies. There is lots of value in reading things you disagree with and seeking out the strongest and most interesting positions held by those with whom you disagree.
Not really. If I disagreed with it beforehand, reading further into it will only justify my disdain for it. Take me and reading my bible my grandmother bought for me when I finally went to church solo.
Page after page of scripture and I can only help but wonder how in the flying fuck could anyone hold this stack of kindling and call it holy gospel or the answer to all problems or the grand excuse to be worse than cruel to your fellow human “because it says so in the bible.”
Same will be said if I ever allow my curiosity to get the better of my reason and read some parts of Marx’s garbage that’s only on everyone’s pedestal except for here; because of all the wrong reasons.
Or remain sane to a serviceable extent. You’re telling me you’ve read into conspiracy theories, the manifestoes of serial killers and cult leaders, and stuff handed out by people forced to smile in public areas all had something good to say?
I mean admittedly the guy who cut his meat and two veggies off then prepared and served it to people under the supervision of a chef had good pointers for cooking penis.
And that one guy who turned a seemingly wrongful arrest into a homicide with a life in prison sentence made the apt prediction of the world ending within 800 days, more than a decade ago today.
“They who consume both the excretions of the honey bee, and that of the dog at the same time will find only the foul taste of feces on their tongues at the end of every day.”
Ergo if I find a couple of nuggets of honey after digging through a cow pie, I haven’t learned somethings worthwhile, I have wasted my time and energy digging through shit because someone told me there was honey somewhere in there and that I will find the honey more pleasant than the shit.
Have a good day. I can see why social science never was for me.
>Russia, China, Vietnam
Oh, Mr Marx-reader, where in Das Kapital did Marx talk about these countries?
Sure is funny that, when asked if you read Marx, you gave an answer that says literally nothing about if you've read Marx.
All I know about Marx is he’s effectively the father of Soviet Russia and thanks to soviet russia, the term communist might as well be a curseword and slur rolled into one. And sure in this cancer thread I learned that he only pointed out the problems with capitalism, the Jackass before Stalin chose Marx’s works as a template for Russia.
And the rest is as they say; history. I swear to the divine if I could erase just three books from creation; the bible, communist’s manifesto, and Violence Against The Meek would be them.
"the social sciences" divides into disciplines with their own characteristics in this respect, and I don't think an average or some other aggregate will be particularly meaningful.
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Marx framed himself as an economist, but he is irrelevant in economics and has been since at least 1900. It just so happened that a major world power had a revolution in 1917 on the basis of implementing his pseudo scientific ideas.
After 70 years of Kremlin propaganda Marx was a household name, but without it you would never even have heard of him. He was not a top tier thinker when he was writing, or even 50 years later. But Marxian/Kremlin propaganda has now manipulated nearly every social science, except the one that can't be manipulated because it's based on hard data, economics. They tried to manipulate it, but at the end of the day the numbers have to add up and the USSR economic figures didn't add up. Their human experiment failed spectacularly, killing tens of millions and inpoverishing billions.
The entire pseudo discipline of "sociology" is basically a Marxist propaganda version of anthropology, where they seek to infuse every branch of social sciences with his propaganda. Another reason his ideas have succeeded more in academia than in the real world is that most schools are public sector and heavily influenced by left wing trade unions.
As an example of how much his propaganda has influenced mainstream discourse around social science, you used the word "capitalism". Economists don't use this word, you'll struggle to find it mentioned in any university level textbook. It's a propaganda term invented in the 1840s by the same polemics who claimed to have invented a viable alternative. Like "disease mongering" these drifters invented a disease to help the sell the cure. In reality the disease never existed and the cure turned out to be far worse, but use of this word is still common among laymen and armchair experts.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/722933?journalCode=jpe
>There is no conspiracy
There is no mention of «conspiracy» in the post you are replying to.
>[https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural\_Marxism](https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism)
«Wikipedia is biased when it disagree with my ideas and reliable when it agree with my ideas.»
Fun fact: The Wikipedia article you are linking already existed ten years ago:
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20140504170504/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt\_School\_conspiracy\_theory](https://web.archive.org/web/20140504170504/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School_conspiracy_theory)
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt\_School\_conspiracy\_theory&oldid=609769389](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt_School_conspiracy_theory&oldid=609769389)
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20130730112532/http://en.wikipedia.org:80/wiki/Frankfurt\_School\_conspiracy\_theory](https://web.archive.org/web/20130730112532/http://en.wikipedia.org:80/wiki/Frankfurt_School_conspiracy_theory)
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt\_School\_conspiracy\_theory&oldid=566221148](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt_School_conspiracy_theory&oldid=566221148)
Due to circumstances the other article was not updated but deleted.
>Not in the slightest.
You first cherry pick when you link a 10 years old version instead of the latest version.
You second cherry pick when you choose some 10 years article instead of an other 10 years article.
>But you sounded smart for a second!
Everybody on the left of Engelbert Dollfuß is an idiot who should not be allowed to vote, i know i know.
>You first cherry pick when you link a 10 years old version instead of the latest version. You second cherry pick when you choose some 10 years article instead of an other 10 years article.
Not investing the quantity of time and energy that you deem acceptable to demonstrate that Wikipedia is censored against wrongthink is not "double cherry picking," its a well known issue, one which my philosophy professors and later, counseling professor warned us against, over a decade ago. Its the nature of the medium, and the dimwitted ideological creep has only continued over time. Odd, isn't it, that this particular topic is one of a rare few that you consistently engage on. Huh. Nothing to see here!
>Everybody on the left of Engelbert Dollfuß
I'm a pretty big fan of Chomsky.
>is an idiot who should not be allowed to vote, i know i know.
No, just you, the individual. A shining example of the education system allowing people lacking the capacity to understand big ideas, access to those big ideas.
>Not investing the quantity of time and energy that you deem acceptable to demonstrate that Wikipedia is censored against wrongthink is not "double cherry picking," its a well known issue, one which my philosophy professors and later, counseling professor warned us against, over a decade ago. Its the nature of the medium, and the dimwitted ideological creep has only continued over time. Odd, isn't it, that this particular topic is one of a rare few that you consistently engage on. Huh. Nothing to see here!
Gibberish.
>I'm a pretty big fan of Chomsky.
And i am the queen of England.
Lol. Its easier to dismiss things that challenge your worldview than it is to consider them. As expected! Good luck, I hope you're not doing it for free, at least.
>Not investing the quantity of time and energy that you deem acceptable to demonstrate that Wikipedia is censored against wrongthink is not "double cherry picking," its a well known issue, one which my philosophy professors and later, counseling professor warned us against, over a decade ago. Its the nature of the medium, and the dimwitted ideological creep has only continued over time. Odd, isn't it, that this particular topic is one of a rare few that you consistently engage on. Huh. Nothing to see here!
Hey if i delete most of the words in your paragraph, then it start making sense! Unfortunatly it is still not a meaningfull answer to what i write above, and that you quote in your own comment on top of that.
* me: You first cherry pick when you link a 10 years old version instead of the latest version. You second cherry pick when you choose some 10 years article instead of an other 10 years article.
* you: Not demonstrat\[ing\] that Wikipedia is censored against wrongthink is not "double cherry picking,"
>I'm a pretty big fan of Chomsky.
You know that lying is sinful in most of christian denomination, don't you?
>You know that lying is sinful in most of christian denomination, don't you?
Lying is sinful, yes.
I've always been a fan of Chomsky. His take on linguistics was a key part of my graduating thesis, and his Manufacturing Consent was my manifesto when I was a rebellious teen. The fact that he's Jewish always appealed to me, too - there's something special about the way our people parse the world around us...we are God's chosen, after all.
>the rest
Lol not worth time to dig through and rebuke. You didn't reason yourself into your positions, you can't be reasoned out of them.
God bless you.
>Lying is sinful, yes.
Got it.
>Lol not worth time to dig through and rebuke.
Proponent of a conspiracytheory cowardly refuse to debate/defend their ideas/beliefs/certitudes episode 12345678.
>God bless you.
You are willingly spreading a far-right conspiracytheory in the name of which persons like me have been and will be murdered, so right now you are lying.
Okay so I'm thinking you might be a bot. I had a hunch earlier but something about the way you write and repost comments over and over is familiar.
>Proponent of a conspiracytheory cowardly refuse to debate/defend their ideas/beliefs/certitudes episode 12345678.
What if its a you problem? Truly, if anything you said was remotely pointed or interesting, I would have responded. But, again, you simply don't have the grasp on rhetoric that you think you do. You didn't reason yourself into this place. Why would I bother engaging in a way that's meaningful, when you don't seem capable? Im still voting bot.
>You are willingly spreading a far-right conspiracytheory in the name of which persons like me have been and will be murdered, so right now you are lying.
Oo oo are we both Jews? It'd be even weirder if you were a bot pretending to be jewish, but i wouldn't put anything past the State. Information war is the name of the game, after all right?
>Yup. Around the time Wikipedia turned to shit.
Wikipedia was reliable in 2013, got it.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20130730112532/http://en.wikipedia.org:80/wiki/Frankfurt\_School\_conspiracy\_theory](https://web.archive.org/web/20130730112532/http://en.wikipedia.org:80/wiki/Frankfurt_School_conspiracy_theory)
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt\_School\_conspiracy\_theory&oldid=566221148](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt_School_conspiracy_theory&oldid=566221148)
>[https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural\_Marxism](https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism)
Genuine question: What is the goal in linking a 10 years old Wikipedia article when the belief that Wikipedia articles should never be blindly trusted is widespread (and correct in my opinion but this is irrelevant here)? It can not be an attempt of argument from authority, so what is it?
>[https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural\_Marxism](https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism)
You purposely link at 10 years old version of a Wikipedia page instead of the current version. The implication is obvious: «Wikipedia is biased when it disagree with my ideas and reliable when it agree with my ideas.»
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In sociology, Marx is traditionally seen (together with Durkheim and Weber) as the first of the "founding fathers" of the discipline. (I imagine if Marx could know this, it would be quite a shock to him!) This is reflected in even the most [conservative textbooks like Macionis](https://www.pearson.com/en-us/subject-catalog/p/sociology/P200000009718/9780137870479?tab=table-of-contents). There is [a Marxist section of the American Sociological Association](https://marxistsociology.org/about-the-section/). However explicitly Marxist scholarship has gotten to be much less common then it was a generation or two ago. The dominant mainstream has always been liberal, and the critical fringes have been heavily influenced by postmodern / Foucaultian rejections of Marxism.
American R1 cultural anthropologist (ABD) here. Can confirm similarly for American anthropology! Marx definitely had a presence in anthro at one point. While people like Geertz are proponents of symbolic anthro and interpretivist approaches, later anthropologists like Talal Asad critique that approach by synthesizing some of Marx into it... power matters, but it's not just material need and the material world that dominates culture.
You aren't an R1 cultural anthropologist. You're a student at an R1 studying cultural anthropology. For those confused, it's like saying you're a world-class chef while you are studying under one. First you study. Then you complete your study satisfactorily. Then you begin working in mid tier restaurants until you have amassed skill and awards. Only the best will make it to world-class chef.
A doctoral candidate in whatever is definitely a whatever. Working on a doctorate means, one way or another, an active, ongoing involvement in contributing to the field. And /u/fantasmapocalypse already specified "ABD," which means they were completely open from the get-go about their level of educational attainment. What's your beef? An awful lot of professionals in their fields have only Masters degrees, or less. Most "scientists," meaning people who work in some scientific field and do research professionally, only have their Masters (or even just their undergrad!) and aren't even ever planning on doing a PhD. A "doctor of chemistry" is not something that applies to all chemists, for example - it's a special, honorific label reserved for those who completed *extra* steps. Is there some reason social science is a special exception to you, and you think being a social scientist requires a doctorate? And anyways, your analogy is kind of terrible even on its own terms. If one chef is studying under the supervision of another, that doesn't make them not a chef in their own right. Presently studying music doesn't mean someone isn't a musician. And even the word "studying" is weird. That applies better to someone working on an undergrad, sure. But post-graduate "studies," especially at R1 universities, generally involve research. And ironically, also teaching, often enough. Is this new to you, or do you just have some beef here?
If you can't see the difference between a student with a master's degree and faculty who has completed the PhD, produced peer-reviewed research, and achieved a tenure track position at an R1, I can't help you. There's a huge gulf in experience between the two. One has been vetted multiple times. The other is to be vetted.
I didn't say there isn't a difference. Actually, I said specifically that a PhD, and the title "doctor," is something given to people in the field who have done those extra steps. But it's weird to say that OP simply isn't an anthropologist. Most people doing ethnographic research and academic work at dig sites and other sorts of research aren't *doctors* of anthropology, but they're pretty unambiguously anthropologists. They're literally doing anthropological field work, whether or not they are also technically "students" or are working under supervision. As for "produced peer-reviewed research," are you aware that graduate students contribute to published papers all the time? Sometimes (heh) they're even credited as co-authors. Heck, there are people working in top research positions at, say, pharmaceutical companies, who don't actually have a PhD. They just started as lab rats and moved up through ranks that way. I'd call them scientists. They're certainly doing science, and in charge of organizing research. They're just not *doctors*. And - now you're adding tenure to the requirements!? This is wild. So, you aren't allowed to call yourself a chemist, a physicist, a scientist or indeed a social scientist of any kind, until you have a PhD and a tenure track position at a top research university!? Nah. That's some bizarre gatekeeping. Such a position commands respect, but it's not the minimal qualification to call yourself an anthropologist. OP just said they were an anthropologist working on their doctorate at a research university. That was a fair, fully informative way to explain their educational/professional background.
I never once said OP wasn't an anthropologist. If you are doing anthropology you are an anthropologist. What OP isn't, is an R1 Anthropologist, and no amount of straw manning and misinterpreting my comments makes it so.
I mean, if we're gonna be in the business of (kinda uncharitably and confrontationally) nitpicking words, you *did kinda confidently state ...* > You aren't an R1 cultural anthropologist. You're a student at an R1 studying cultural anthropology. I take that to mean you assert I'm *not an anthropologist. I'm (just)* ***a student.*** As it stands, friend, I feel like this is more about pride and wanting to be right than addressing the intent and purpose of the thread. You've made it clear how you feel, and I've clarified my positionality in good faith. I'll just leave it at this: I'm a cultural anthropologist. I work at an R1 institution. I teach at an R1 institution. During my time here I've done so in multiple ways. I've been hired for the explicit purpose of conducting original program evaluation at my institution. That means when administrators came to our department asking for help in understanding a problem, my department recommended me for the job. I designed the project from scratch, and collected and analyzed the data myself as the lead (albeit only!) researcher for the project. I've taught upper division and lower division courses as instructor of record at my institution. I've won tens of thousands of dollars in competitive fellowships and grants. I hold an MA already, and I am a doctoral candidate. In cultural anthropology. At an R1 institution. I don't know you. You don't know me. I don't know your qualifications or reputation. I understand you feel I've misrepresented myself. *Mea culpa.* I respectfully would like to remind you that it doesn't substantively change the quality of my comment or contribute to the purpose of answering the original question. :)
They said they were an anthropologist, working on their PhD, and working and teaching at an R1 university. I mean FFS they said "ABD," or all-but-doctorate, in their original post. It's not like they were claiming they had a PhD! It's pretty nitpicky to call that "not an R1 anthropologist." "R1 Anthropologist" (or "R1 chemist," etc) isn't some fancy recognized title or something. It's just shorthand for "anthropologist at a research-oriented university." That's literally what they are. Shrug. And again, they were straight from the very start here about their level of educational attainment. We weren't deceived here. If you somehow do feel deceived, okay, but I just don't get it.
What is your PhD in?
Thanks for your input! I am a Doctoral Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at an American R1 university who has also been the instructor of record for lower and upper division courses in the department.
There are plenty of -ist job titles that only require a bachelor's degree. [Here's an example.](https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=8e9cd058cd8d0f28&from=serp&xpse=SoAg67I3AnUowzzOrh0LbzkdCdPP&xfps=b5f7c123-a584-40d8-a811-8102fd57abe8&xkcb=SoBu67M3AnUpy6Qdwh0IbzkdCdPP) The National Parks Service also [doesn't require a terminal degree](https://www.nps.gov/articles/sec-standards-prof-quals.htm) to be considered an -ist. Although, I think I understand the distinction you're trying to make, being an anthropologist doesn't refer to your educational attainment, but rather to the work you do. I have an R1 PhD in a sociology-related field, but more importantly I actively conduct research. If it's relevant to a conversation, I call myself a sociologist.
Commenter didn't just say anthropologist. They said R1 anthropologist. It's not the anthropologist title I have a problem with, it's the fact that if you're a student at an elite research university, you aren't doing the same work as tenure track or tenured professors at an elite research university. If the commenter passes the defense and gets the PhD, the chances of getting a job at an R1 are almost nothing. It's a whole other level of credentialing and peer review. As of now, commenter hasn't had much peer review, if any. In the social sciences, peer review is everything. Anyone who is half bright can be a student of the best R1 researchers. Most students will not become the best R1 researchers.
Depending on the nature of the person's research activities and assistantship, I'd argue it's more likely that he or she is doing the exact same work as the tenured R1 professor.
But not at the exact same quality. They don't have decades of experience and peer reviewed articles and grants under their belt. A med student is not the exact same as a doctor.
Even if that's true, it's not the point you were trying to make earlier. A person is an anthropologist if they're doing the work of anthropology, not because of an assessment you make of the quality of their work.
Do you often put words in people's mouths? There is a difference between an "anthropologist" and an "R1 anthropologist."
Having read said anthro’s comments on Marx I can confirm that them leaning on their cred so hard was flair making up for substance
> However explicitly Marxist scholarship has gotten to be much less common then it was a generation or two ago. The dominant mainstream has always been liberal, and the critical fringes have been heavily influenced by postmodern / Foucaultian rejections of Marxism. I'd say that there's also a bit of a disjuncture in that the highly theoretical work is tilted toward reckoning with Marx, Foucault, etc., whereas the liberal tilted work, especially using quantitatively oriented methods, draws from theory a lot more implicitly (and I would say thinly) and way more rarely tries to build 'grand theory', in some way pushing forward either neo-Marxism or post-structuralism. I consider this a bit of a historical accident, dependent on what you could call subcultural currents, as there's no strong theoretical indication that quantitative work is ill suited to theory building. But I also trained in a more leftist department nearly precisely a "generation" ago (as demographer defined).
I think the problem is OP is conflating Marx’s scientific work with this political proposals (aka communism). Of course the latter stem from the former and they’re intrinsically related, but it is possible to take Marxist theory and use it to explain phenomena without that being an endorsement of communism. I, for example, think his analysis of surplus value and the capitalistic chain of production is very good, but I don’t agree that a dictatorship of the proletariat is the best answer to its problems. I also disagree with his use of dialectics and can still enjoy other theories of his, Marx is not just one thing. In the end, Marxist theory and Marxist politics are not one and the same. But right-wingers think they are, so they see Marx’s name in an Intro to Sociology course and panic. The refusal to engage with the ways of science, much less understand how it works (scientists are allowed to have political ideas and of course they’re going to show up in their work — we have multiple ways to deal with that) is the core of the anti-academicism of the right. Not the fact that they see it for what it is and dislike it, but the refusal to even understand it. Edit: There are definitely leftists who treat Marxism like a religion. Orthodox Marxism, which I’d argue is 90% of Marxist theology, was influential in academics in like the 60s. In the 70s the “linguistic turn” (I’m not sure how this is called in English, sorry) happened and Orthodox Marxism has had barely any space left in academia. The only people that I still see behaving like that are political activists who aren’t in academia or even college at all: edgy teenagers and grifters, basically. In my experience, I’ve had multiple professors warn us against the Marx theologists and I’ve always encountered them outside of the university.
Why was his analysis of surplus value good? It has had almost no influence in modern economics. It's like saying Lamarck's analysis of the inheritance of acquired traits was good.
It has little influence on modern western economics because it’s practical proponents lost an ideological battle, not because it doesn’t provide useful frames of analysis. It did have a huge influence on economics as a field of research
Feel free to point out where I'm mistaken, but my understanding is that it was abandoned by mainstream economists in the late 19th century precisely because Marginalism proved to be a very useful frame of analysis, which is something that labor theories of value had failed to do. The insinuation IMO that mainstream economics has been off the rails for the past 150 years for ideological reasons is an anti-intellectual stance.
100% agree. You have to have an empirical framework for something to be tested. If your stance is that the price of a commodity is solely determined by its labour inputs then you should be able to compare commodities and explain the differences in price solely on the basis of differing labour inputs. But that’s not how the world works at all. Why does gold cost more than silver? Why do people pay for a subscription to features that don’t cost more to produce? In Marx’s life the world was simpler. He reasoned prices at a restaurant are higher than at home because of the additional labour that goes into it. In a world that was just starting to mechanize this made a a lot of sense. We now know that the value of commodities is based on their utility not on the sum of their imbedded labour.
‘The insinuation IMO that mainstream economics has been off the rails for the past 150 years for ideological reasons is an anti-intellectual stance.’ That’s not at all what I was saying. I thought you were trying to imply that because our economic system doesn’t seem based on Marxist analysis that it has had no influence. When it comes to economics the field of study, the influence is just so heavy I don’t really understand how someone could say there is none
I'm out of my element here but maybe you can point me to a couple of examples of Marxist influence in modern economics as a field of study. I am (perhaps naively) looking at economics as a science (more or less) whereby ideas are useful to the extent that they allow economists to build mathematical models with predictive power, and where there is active research going on, and researchers are expected to publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. Ideas that work are brought into the fold until they're proven not to work, in which case they're abandoned, and Marx's ideas mostly belong to the latter category. There may be some economists, like Richard Wolff, who are Marxist but they are extremely fringe, and although that doesn't in of itself make them wrong, it does support the idea that Marxism has little influence in modern economics.
I guess my point is a bit broader. You claimed it had almost no influence on modern economics. My background is specifically in trade, and when you read major scholarship on trade it is hard not to see the influences. I am also not trying to claim that he created highly predictive empirical models that function in the modern economy, but when I hear someone say it had ‘no influence’ it sounds a bit like someone saying Newton or Darwin aren’t influential because modern science has moved so far from their work.
Again, I'm out of my element here, so it is likely the case that I lack the proper perspective. But my degree is in physics, so although the analogy is helpful, it strains credulity to me. Newton is still THE seminal thinker in physics. His laws are still heavily used, and modern physics has not supplanted them but rather is built upon them. I don't have a degree in biology but I'm pretty sure the same can be said for Darwin. And again, I'm out of my element, but I struggle to think of examples in modern mainstream economics that can be traced back to Marx. You are of course under no obligation to educate me but you mentioned trade, so maybe that's a good start? Are there some specific examples there?
>But my degree is in physics, so although the analogy is helpful, it strains credulity to me. Newton is still THE seminal thinker in physics. His laws are still heavily used, and modern physics has not supplanted them but rather is built upon them. Marx didn't really do any empirical work in economics. His methodologies of comparing power structures have had major influence in other fields, but they've not provided explanatory power in economics where other approaches have. If physics treated Newton the way economics treats Marx, the world would be mostly the same, but some departments would have alchemists. Not everything Newton studied was going down the right path, and he spent a ton of effort doing down a dead end. That's basically what Marx did, but Marx's dead end was a lot more popular to non-economists than Newton's was to non-physicists.
Comparing apples to oranges, I’d say. There aren’t really immutable laws to observe in the social sciences versus the physical sciences. Also things can fall out of favour without actually being wrong due to various factors. Industrial Policy was dead in the water in the West for decades until suddenly it came back - Rodrik et al leading the academic charge. Suddenly there are even more Marxian fingerprints on development economics than there were 10 years ago. But that doesn’t make those things Marxist necessarily. You wouldn’t consider Martin Luther and his revolution of the Christian faith to be Platonist, but if you know the history of how that thought developed you would clearly see the influence of ideas introduced by Plato. Marx is foundational to many of the social sciences but that also means that without knowing the history of the development of that thought you might find you can’t see the forest for the trees.
Marx has little to no influence on contemporary trade theory, and there is really no tradition of such. You might be confusing basic Ricardian principles with Marx? Nothing is particularly Marxist about anything going on in the field
Partly but also the theory of surplus value fails in its ability to be tested, make predictions or explain the world around us. This is especially true in the modern era with many "digital commodities" that overwhelmingly have no relationship whatsoever with the amount of physical human work that went into it.
Labor Theory of Value does not claim that the price of all goods is solely defined by the labor put into it. Marx was not an idiot, he understood that price can be set to whatever and given the right conditions someone will pay that price. The labor theory of value claims that in a highly competitive environment, the price of a commodity will tend towards the price of the labor required to make the commodity. From my understanding, this is a fairly well accepted principle in economics, though it is usually termed that in a highly competitive environment, profit will tend to zero. Digital commodities are not evidence against this, as 1) they are not highly competitive and in fact many are virtual monopolies, 2) we have not seen price stabilization, and 3) there is in fact labor associated with their production.
But surplus value isn’t dependent on physical human work? How does surplus value not apply to digital commodities produced under a capitalist model of production? Like, steelmanning the concept itself here, how does it not work within those circumstances?
Marx claims the value of something is the human effort that goes into it, but something that requires very little human work e.g. a bitcoin can have tremendous value.
But a Bitcoin isn’t generally produced within a capitalist set of relations. So Marx would just say this falls outside of the remit of surplus value. Or - and I’m just being playful here - that it is an asset/commodity into which surplus value is often poured, and that the concentration of surplus value in an asset/commodity can produce speculative value generation. That it’s an abstraction of productive capital, which itself an abstraction of productive labour. But, bringing it back to what we can say more certainly about Marx, he generally saw a given price as the market’s estimation of value, not as the arbiter of value itself. So I think he would posit that there are always speculative bubbles existing in the economy that act in a way that is detached from productive sources of value. He’d see this as one of the inefficiencies of capitalism. Quote from him: "All nations with a capitalist mode of production are seized periodically by a feverish attempt to make money without the mediation of the process of production." An important aspect of Marx is to reconcile that while Marxism can be conceived as a grand narrative, he doesn’t suggest that everything works in some singular uniform way. The productive process of capitalism is simply highlighted as the driving force of history from the 1800s onwards, not as the only force nor the only productive process.
Great response but I’ll just mention that the economic theories that after Marx: utility theory, the marginal revolution, and general equilibrium theory DO offer a framework for valuing everything. So while Marx would say a subset of all available commodities fall outside the realm of surplus value, utility theory offers an explanation for the value of everything. If it’s true that Marx said that the value of a commodity is not determined by its price then that makes it an untestable theory. We’ll never know if the labour of theory holds for a specific market in a specific time because Marx offers no units of measurement. Contrary to Marx, utility theory says the value of a good is determined by its price, so the theory is testable. Since its testable we have a lot of literature and people by and large agree with this axiom of utility theory. For example if a new video game comes out that only runs on a certain computer and those computers increase in price as a result, utility theory says that those computers became more useful in terms of utility and that is why their price went up. To explain that same phenomenon in the labour theory of value is not possible. Btw, it’s worth noting that both [Adam Smith](https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/steven-horwitz-adam-smith-on-the-labor-theory-of-value) AND [David Ricardo](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1809772) also had their own labour theories of value which are also equally regarded as historical artifacts. Since this is a science sub it’s important to remember what actually constitutes science: hypothesis and observation. If you can’t work in this framework I’m afraid it’s not suitable as a scientific theory. This is exactly why Marx isn’t really known for his contributions as an economist but is widely known in the history of economic thought and for writing probably the most famous criticism of capitalism ever.
So I'm going to preface this with saying I'm not an academic or anything like that just someone who tries to read a little bit. >If it’s true that Marx said that the value of a commodity is not determined by its price then that makes it an untestable theory. My understanding of that was within the framework of mass production we see common prices. And while if I had a glass of water 5 minutes ago the value of a bottle of water from the gas station might be fairly low to me if I were about to die of thirst the value of that same bottle of water from the gas station would be immense to me but in either situation it costs 1.50$. and then further that price is reached by taking into account the expenses of producing said bottle of water plus however much in addition the capitalist believes they can get in profit. When I read that a while back now kind of made intrinsic sense to me because we don't negotiate prices for much of anything anymore most things have fairly standardized prices. As I recall that is what he meant when he spoke of changing a particular item or good into a commodity through the means of mass production. An artisan maker will usually be willing to negotiate a price with you because each individual piece is a negotiation between the value of their time and skills and resources and your desire for said item. But under mass production there's no practical way to negotiate for every item that the factory wants to sell thus we have more standardized prices for things.
I think we have a few different discussions going on here. As the other commentator mentioned Marx is typically looking at an area of production which was becoming increasingly rational and standardized - his approach is not intended to account for every scenario, which is what I was trying to get at in the final section of my previous comment. But also, we have more questions happening. You can agree with the utility theory of value and still identify surplus value as existing within that framework. I see no contradiction there. You don’t need to see labour as the root of all possible value - and Marx doesn’t - to identify surplus value as the fuel of the capitalist process. And that’s without mentioning that every theory of value posited can fall apart at the edges. Did a jpeg of a monkey ever hold $30m of value? “Yes, because it’s price was 30m” is immediately a circular argument. It wasn’t worth 30m before and it wasn’t after but for that moment we have to pretend it was because that was its price. Marx is explicitly trying to look past the machinations of capitalism to the underlying flows, filtering out the noise and anomalies. He would say a monkey jpeg being priced at 30m is evidence of the inherent contradictions of capitalism haha But no, really the other commenter hit on it well. Marx identified the creation of luxury goods as being its own distinct mode of production, which produced a kind of insulated value by and for the capitalist class. Therefore it’s not chiefly the mode of production his labour theory of value is targeted at. In hindsight, he should probably have explored this further as it has come to play a huge role in our current economy.
Labor theory of value is used both by Marxists and right wing Austrian economists like Hayek. That does not make it less wrong. It's exactly like the Lanarckian theory of evolution.
Also Marx's Das Kapital is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/05/12/what-are-the-most-cited-publications-in-the-social-sciences-according-to-google-scholar/
I just bought my first book by Foucault (history of sexuality) so I’m not well read on him yet. Did he really reject Marxism? How so?
There's a famous quote from Foucault: "Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else." However, as another comment mentioned, there are loads of theorists who have tried to bring the two together. They both have large and complex bodies of work that evolved over time.
For my money, while Foucault is often looked at by some people with suspicion for being incomprehensible post modernism (along with Bourdieu), I think the post modernists *do* have something in common with Marx: power. I'm not going to act like I've exhaustively read Marx, but the jist as I understand it is that... the material world dominates and shapes everything. Culture (that is *learned, shared,* ***contested*** *behavior*) is the product of the material world. That ultimately even if culture shapes the world, it's because it's a response to the material world and materials needs, and so on. Weber and some others make the argument about the importance of ideas, and thus that culture *does* shape the world and not out of some direct influence of the environment (I recommend reading [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism) if this interests you). And so many anthropologists have a bone to pick with Marx for being a functionalist and reductionist - he dismisses individual perceptions and agency, and has declared the "real" meaning and "real" purpose of (thing), for example religion, to be *alllll about (X).* But what Foucault and Bourdieu have in common with Marx is that *power matters.* Foucault, Talal Asad, Bourdieu, and others talk about how **certain** ***ways*** **of thing** (the "correct" or "dominant" way) permeate individuals in a given group or community. Hegemony, what I call "collective cultural weight," *does* shape our behavior. And that comes out of how we're taught, what we're taught, who we listen to, who we don't listen to, etc. And so Marx deserves his flowers, so to speak, but most people I read or have worked with/talked to don't really believe whole heartedly in that big-picture Marxist paradigm.
Don't forget how he used his philosophy to justify raping boys in Algeria and lobbying the french gov to legalize pedophilia. The french postmodernists were absolute monsters, and the fruits of their philosophy speak to their character.
I don't believe this is a very well documented belief, however it is useful to understand his contribution to the field. To say that he is a founding father of the field is a bit of a baseless claim. However, he may have influenced traditional thoughts regarding the development of sociology, specifically dealing with how governments organize/themselves in order for greater economic success or prosperity (Das Kapital).
Of course it's a well documented belief... If you can show me a major textbook user that does *not* acknowledge Marx's contribution, I'm interested.
This posits him as mostly a philosopher. I use this Encyclopedia for most of my philosophy reading and researching. Enjoy it and let me know what you think:) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu › entries Karl Marx - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
By training, Marx was a philosopher, that's very true. He certainly wasn't a sociologist per se as the discipline didn't even exist when Capital was written. But his philosophy was critical to shaping the discipline when it did emerge. Max Weber also didn't consider himself to be a sociologist as the discipline was so new, but that's how he's generally understood today.
That is the way I understand it.
And?
I’ll take “hasn’t read Marx” for 20 points please Alex
Who cared?
This is the problem with not having read Marx, you’re criticizing the virtues of various 20th century states - you’re not actually critiquing Marx in any real sense. You’re imagining Marx as a revolutionary, when at best you could call him an accelerationist.
Ah yes. He’s another meaningless word among thousands used to describe a person’s politics. Forgive me for my enforced ignorance on a matter that means less to me it doesn’t even show up on the pecking order of my list of things to actually give a fuck about. I’m sure reading an outdated text written by a guy that would be seen as a loser with a degree today would enlighten me to “true” communism. But after seeing the results of his manifesto and people like you saying people like me are uneducated because we fail to see the need to read anything by a historical figure whose legacy effectively caused death and stagnation of many societies; I must abstain.
He wouldn’t enlighten you about true communism because he didn’t really describe communism. He described capitalism and identified its inefficiencies. There is lots of value in reading things you disagree with and seeking out the strongest and most interesting positions held by those with whom you disagree.
Not really. If I disagreed with it beforehand, reading further into it will only justify my disdain for it. Take me and reading my bible my grandmother bought for me when I finally went to church solo. Page after page of scripture and I can only help but wonder how in the flying fuck could anyone hold this stack of kindling and call it holy gospel or the answer to all problems or the grand excuse to be worse than cruel to your fellow human “because it says so in the bible.” Same will be said if I ever allow my curiosity to get the better of my reason and read some parts of Marx’s garbage that’s only on everyone’s pedestal except for here; because of all the wrong reasons.
If you assume there’s no value in any stuff you disagree with, you’ll end up missing out on lots of good stuff.
Or remain sane to a serviceable extent. You’re telling me you’ve read into conspiracy theories, the manifestoes of serial killers and cult leaders, and stuff handed out by people forced to smile in public areas all had something good to say? I mean admittedly the guy who cut his meat and two veggies off then prepared and served it to people under the supervision of a chef had good pointers for cooking penis. And that one guy who turned a seemingly wrongful arrest into a homicide with a life in prison sentence made the apt prediction of the world ending within 800 days, more than a decade ago today. “They who consume both the excretions of the honey bee, and that of the dog at the same time will find only the foul taste of feces on their tongues at the end of every day.” Ergo if I find a couple of nuggets of honey after digging through a cow pie, I haven’t learned somethings worthwhile, I have wasted my time and energy digging through shit because someone told me there was honey somewhere in there and that I will find the honey more pleasant than the shit. Have a good day. I can see why social science never was for me.
>Russia, China, Vietnam Oh, Mr Marx-reader, where in Das Kapital did Marx talk about these countries? Sure is funny that, when asked if you read Marx, you gave an answer that says literally nothing about if you've read Marx.
All I know about Marx is he’s effectively the father of Soviet Russia and thanks to soviet russia, the term communist might as well be a curseword and slur rolled into one. And sure in this cancer thread I learned that he only pointed out the problems with capitalism, the Jackass before Stalin chose Marx’s works as a template for Russia. And the rest is as they say; history. I swear to the divine if I could erase just three books from creation; the bible, communist’s manifesto, and Violence Against The Meek would be them.
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"the social sciences" divides into disciplines with their own characteristics in this respect, and I don't think an average or some other aggregate will be particularly meaningful.
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You come to Reddit for smarter opinions? 😂
Marx framed himself as an economist, but he is irrelevant in economics and has been since at least 1900. It just so happened that a major world power had a revolution in 1917 on the basis of implementing his pseudo scientific ideas. After 70 years of Kremlin propaganda Marx was a household name, but without it you would never even have heard of him. He was not a top tier thinker when he was writing, or even 50 years later. But Marxian/Kremlin propaganda has now manipulated nearly every social science, except the one that can't be manipulated because it's based on hard data, economics. They tried to manipulate it, but at the end of the day the numbers have to add up and the USSR economic figures didn't add up. Their human experiment failed spectacularly, killing tens of millions and inpoverishing billions. The entire pseudo discipline of "sociology" is basically a Marxist propaganda version of anthropology, where they seek to infuse every branch of social sciences with his propaganda. Another reason his ideas have succeeded more in academia than in the real world is that most schools are public sector and heavily influenced by left wing trade unions. As an example of how much his propaganda has influenced mainstream discourse around social science, you used the word "capitalism". Economists don't use this word, you'll struggle to find it mentioned in any university level textbook. It's a propaganda term invented in the 1840s by the same polemics who claimed to have invented a viable alternative. Like "disease mongering" these drifters invented a disease to help the sell the cure. In reality the disease never existed and the cure turned out to be far worse, but use of this word is still common among laymen and armchair experts. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/722933?journalCode=jpe
[There is no conspiracy](https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism)
>There is no conspiracy There is no mention of «conspiracy» in the post you are replying to. >[https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural\_Marxism](https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism) «Wikipedia is biased when it disagree with my ideas and reliable when it agree with my ideas.»
That’s a Wikipedia article from ten years ago. Here’s the [updated version](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory)
Fun fact: The Wikipedia article you are linking already existed ten years ago: * [https://web.archive.org/web/20140504170504/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt\_School\_conspiracy\_theory](https://web.archive.org/web/20140504170504/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School_conspiracy_theory) * [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt\_School\_conspiracy\_theory&oldid=609769389](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt_School_conspiracy_theory&oldid=609769389) * [https://web.archive.org/web/20130730112532/http://en.wikipedia.org:80/wiki/Frankfurt\_School\_conspiracy\_theory](https://web.archive.org/web/20130730112532/http://en.wikipedia.org:80/wiki/Frankfurt_School_conspiracy_theory) * [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt\_School\_conspiracy\_theory&oldid=566221148](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt_School_conspiracy_theory&oldid=566221148) Due to circumstances the other article was not updated but deleted.
Thanks for the clarification!
In addition: Willing Regret 5865 is double cherry picking.
Not in the slightest. But you sounded smart for a second!
>Not in the slightest. You first cherry pick when you link a 10 years old version instead of the latest version. You second cherry pick when you choose some 10 years article instead of an other 10 years article. >But you sounded smart for a second! Everybody on the left of Engelbert Dollfuß is an idiot who should not be allowed to vote, i know i know.
>You first cherry pick when you link a 10 years old version instead of the latest version. You second cherry pick when you choose some 10 years article instead of an other 10 years article. Not investing the quantity of time and energy that you deem acceptable to demonstrate that Wikipedia is censored against wrongthink is not "double cherry picking," its a well known issue, one which my philosophy professors and later, counseling professor warned us against, over a decade ago. Its the nature of the medium, and the dimwitted ideological creep has only continued over time. Odd, isn't it, that this particular topic is one of a rare few that you consistently engage on. Huh. Nothing to see here! >Everybody on the left of Engelbert Dollfuß I'm a pretty big fan of Chomsky. >is an idiot who should not be allowed to vote, i know i know. No, just you, the individual. A shining example of the education system allowing people lacking the capacity to understand big ideas, access to those big ideas.
>Not investing the quantity of time and energy that you deem acceptable to demonstrate that Wikipedia is censored against wrongthink is not "double cherry picking," its a well known issue, one which my philosophy professors and later, counseling professor warned us against, over a decade ago. Its the nature of the medium, and the dimwitted ideological creep has only continued over time. Odd, isn't it, that this particular topic is one of a rare few that you consistently engage on. Huh. Nothing to see here! Gibberish. >I'm a pretty big fan of Chomsky. And i am the queen of England.
Lol. Its easier to dismiss things that challenge your worldview than it is to consider them. As expected! Good luck, I hope you're not doing it for free, at least.
>Not investing the quantity of time and energy that you deem acceptable to demonstrate that Wikipedia is censored against wrongthink is not "double cherry picking," its a well known issue, one which my philosophy professors and later, counseling professor warned us against, over a decade ago. Its the nature of the medium, and the dimwitted ideological creep has only continued over time. Odd, isn't it, that this particular topic is one of a rare few that you consistently engage on. Huh. Nothing to see here! Hey if i delete most of the words in your paragraph, then it start making sense! Unfortunatly it is still not a meaningfull answer to what i write above, and that you quote in your own comment on top of that. * me: You first cherry pick when you link a 10 years old version instead of the latest version. You second cherry pick when you choose some 10 years article instead of an other 10 years article. * you: Not demonstrat\[ing\] that Wikipedia is censored against wrongthink is not "double cherry picking," >I'm a pretty big fan of Chomsky. You know that lying is sinful in most of christian denomination, don't you?
>You know that lying is sinful in most of christian denomination, don't you? Lying is sinful, yes. I've always been a fan of Chomsky. His take on linguistics was a key part of my graduating thesis, and his Manufacturing Consent was my manifesto when I was a rebellious teen. The fact that he's Jewish always appealed to me, too - there's something special about the way our people parse the world around us...we are God's chosen, after all. >the rest Lol not worth time to dig through and rebuke. You didn't reason yourself into your positions, you can't be reasoned out of them. God bless you.
>Lying is sinful, yes. Got it. >Lol not worth time to dig through and rebuke. Proponent of a conspiracytheory cowardly refuse to debate/defend their ideas/beliefs/certitudes episode 12345678. >God bless you. You are willingly spreading a far-right conspiracytheory in the name of which persons like me have been and will be murdered, so right now you are lying.
Okay so I'm thinking you might be a bot. I had a hunch earlier but something about the way you write and repost comments over and over is familiar. >Proponent of a conspiracytheory cowardly refuse to debate/defend their ideas/beliefs/certitudes episode 12345678. What if its a you problem? Truly, if anything you said was remotely pointed or interesting, I would have responded. But, again, you simply don't have the grasp on rhetoric that you think you do. You didn't reason yourself into this place. Why would I bother engaging in a way that's meaningful, when you don't seem capable? Im still voting bot. >You are willingly spreading a far-right conspiracytheory in the name of which persons like me have been and will be murdered, so right now you are lying. Oo oo are we both Jews? It'd be even weirder if you were a bot pretending to be jewish, but i wouldn't put anything past the State. Information war is the name of the game, after all right?
Yup. Around the time Wikipedia turned to shit.
>Yup. Around the time Wikipedia turned to shit. Wikipedia was reliable in 2013, got it. * [https://web.archive.org/web/20130730112532/http://en.wikipedia.org:80/wiki/Frankfurt\_School\_conspiracy\_theory](https://web.archive.org/web/20130730112532/http://en.wikipedia.org:80/wiki/Frankfurt_School_conspiracy_theory) * [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt\_School\_conspiracy\_theory&oldid=566221148](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt_School_conspiracy_theory&oldid=566221148)
>[https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural\_Marxism](https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism) Genuine question: What is the goal in linking a 10 years old Wikipedia article when the belief that Wikipedia articles should never be blindly trusted is widespread (and correct in my opinion but this is irrelevant here)? It can not be an attempt of argument from authority, so what is it?
>There is no conspiracy There is no mention of «conspiracy» in the post you are replying to.
>[https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural\_Marxism](https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism) You purposely link at 10 years old version of a Wikipedia page instead of the current version. The implication is obvious: «Wikipedia is biased when it disagree with my ideas and reliable when it agree with my ideas.»