50
what's something you believe strongly but have little knowledge about
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
50 points (94.6% liked)
Asklemmy
49780 readers
552 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Economics. I think they're inexplicable, and yet clearly something is working.
I believe that the fact that there's a saying, "get four economist in a room and you'll get five opinions" is evidence that no one truly understands economics, but many only (wrongly) think they do. I personally believe it's a glitch in the matrix, a hot patch thrown in by developers when the simulation unexpectedly evolved beyond the capacity for barter/trade to handle the scale of the systems. It wasn't well or thoroughly designed, and frequently crashes (like the big one in the 30's, and periodic smaller ones since).
And yet... there's clearly something there.
As @[email protected] said, Marxist economics are sound and they work. The problem is that the conclusions of Marxist economics point to it being unquestionably correct to move beyond capitalism and into socialism, so the capitalist status-quo spends more time trying to make up any excuses they can to keep the gravy train going for that little bit longer. Liberal economists can't form a consensus because it's all based on rejection of working economic theory.
It's even earlier, Marx himself noted that conclusion of LTV itself is socialism and indeed all the economists basing on Ricardo's work arrived at this point. Marx was just completely conscious in his tries and used dialectical materialism unlike others to develop a scientific socialism, thus his theory was the best one. He also noted that this necessity was why the pet economists of capitalists needed to take a step back and turned mainstream political economisc into the superficial justifications of capitalism, that happened with J.S. Mill Junior iirc.
Definitely true! The LTV of course predates Marx, and could easily be used as justification for socialism. I was more referring to the problems with Smith's and Ricardo's work that Marx resolved, giving an even better justification that only points towards socialism.
Yeah other socialist theoreticians fumbled over idealism and several other issues, Marx literally wrote volumes about it (Theories of Surplus Value plus a lot in his other works, he was incredibly well versed in history of economic thought).
Yep! I'm working my way through volume 2 of Capital right now, getting into turnover time, and Marx is about to start discussing Smith and the physiocrats.
Volume 2 is the most dry one, it's nearly entirely about capital circulation.
I know ๐ซ volume 1 had fun metaphors and worked in examples, plus you could really feel Marx's anger. It's a much more engaging work. That being said, volume 2 has been very eye-opening so far, just like volume 1 was, so I'm sticking with it. Should be done with volume 3 early next year at the pace I'm at.