The pamphlet »Quite Right, Mr Trotsky! Some Trotsky Myths Debunked; and how Trotskyists today hamper the Fight for Peace and Socialism« written by english communist Denver Walker in 1985 comes with 21 cartoon sketches
all of which are to be documented in this thread😊
🧵🖼️[1/22]
[Trotsky[ists] be like]
"Down with the communists and socialists!
Down with the Soviet Union!
Down with the people's front against fascism and war!
LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION!"
»A joke is the only way of responding mildly to Trotsky's intolerable phrase-mongering.«
📕 CAPITAL Vol.1, Ch.1, Sec.1: "The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value (The Substance of Value and the Magnitude of Value)"
🧵 18 paragraphs as screenshots, accompanied by a dry plain 1-page-ish summary of the section (not exactly aligning with the screens)
[0/18]
[¶1] First, Marx announces for chapter 1 to begin with the analysis of the *COMMODITY* because in capitalist societies the commodity appears as the elementary form of wealth.
[1/18]
[¶2-4] Then, Marx describes commodities in their capacity as *USE-VALUES*: how they are material things that satisfy human wants, how they come in measurable quantities, and how the discovery of use-values and their quantification/measurability is »the work of history«.
Under capitalism, labourers are not paid according to their contribution to social production but according to the reproduction costs of the one commodity they have to sell: labour-power.
To think otherwise betrays a liberal misunderstanding of Marx's theory of *surplus*-value.
The comrades who yawn at the fact that in the socialized soviet industries, labour was compensated according to contribution to the social working day and *not* according to reproduction costs of labour-power, seem to think that capitalism is when workers get paid for their work.
These comrades totally collapse Marx's main point that capitalists compensate labourers exactly NOT "according to work done", NOT in correspondence to the product of their labour
but "according to the costs of labour-power" = products necessary for the reproduction of labourers.
@Tigger0000 @bartok_mlm @jfcoliveira261 @ianpaulwright 😅this would be embarrassing even if i had to teach much here.
also a lot on the concept table, i can merely put out some opinion based on pedantic sticking / referring to Marx's theory at this point --
to begin with, Marx does not call value "intrinsic value" for good reasons.
@Tigger0000 @bartok_mlm @jfcoliveira261 @ianpaulwright It is not a minor correction to John Lockes "intrinsic value" being subjectivist and arbitrary crap through and through, and we don't just add a bit of objective determinate moment of SNLT-determination to the issue of value to now arrive at a "more objective" "intrinsic value".
@Tigger0000 @bartok_mlm @jfcoliveira261 @ianpaulwright Only SNLT "measured" (actually: deciphered!) in an environment of commodity producers = exchangability of products among different proprietors, attains the quality of value. otherwise value would be *identified* ≡ SNLT, and contradictions value<>SNLT would be ideally liquidated.
Reminder that the famous author of a book called »How to Read Marx's Capital«, Michael Heinrich, publicly falsified the first *paragraph* of Marx's »Capital« in order to slander Engels and to promote Heinrichs very own private anti-Engels *and* anti-Marx »interpretation« of Marx:
Some guy who does not *prohibit* being praised as "the world's leading scholar on Marx" in advertisements for his books should not be taken seriously anyway - but there are certain strange remnants of theoretical credibility surrounding this author.
Some comrades claim that Engels wrote in 1847: "Nations won't exist under communism."
These comrades are profoundly mistaken. They should reconsider and read Engels more closely instead vulgarizing live on anglo twitter dot com what Engels actually wrote in 1847:
It should be added that the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" from 1848 does not contain anything resembling the static notion of "Nations won't exist under communism" either, talking about a *process* of vanishing of national differences and antagonisms between peoples at most:
Only petty-bourgeois radicalist *distortions* and *vulgarizations* of Marxism, of Marx' & Engels' theories & works, entail such clumsy static lines of thought as "Nations won't exist under communism", cutting out the critical sting of Marxism and reducing it to a dogmatic decree.