God necessarily does not exist. Nothing exists out of the material universe, all thought, ideas, and matter exists in the material world. The fact that the material world is observable and knowable, and that not a single idealist notion has ever nor could ever be proven, by nature means materialism is the correct position. Idealism stands against science, and is fading away as human knowledge better understands the world and universe around us.

You haven't explained any of your arguments, even given any examples. You've simply made claims equivalent to "it's absurd," without actually contesting Marx's positions. Either way, since you yourself said to forget everything else, I'll narrow it down to what you believe is the key point:

He can address it all he wants, it contradicts his argument I went over in the first place, that exchange of use values necessitates the presence of value. Forget everything else, this is the argument.

Marx's argument is not contradictory in the slightest. Land, for example, has no "value" but has a price, which is capitalization on rent. Natural resources, for example, have to be processed into a sellable form, which requires land, tools, and labor. Marx's chief argument isn't that use-values exchanging means they must have an underlying value alone, it's that the prices in an economy are not random, and so must be the result of their common elements, as can be exchanged for the universal commodity, money.

Commodity production is a social process, and commodity exchange is also a social process.

I'll also requote your original comment:

Capital rests on the argument ~that the fact qualitatively different (in terms of use values) commodities are exchanged for each other in different quantities requires a quality they share in common which only differs in quantity from one commodity to the next, and Marx posits that the only quality this could be is being products of labor. Yet this is very clearly not something that all commodities have in common,

This is not at all "very clear," and you have not given a single example disproving this. Again, simply saying that something is clear is not in fact a counter.

and that a thing’s status as a commodity and its ability to be exchanged for other commodities has nothing to do with its being a product of labor.

Again, incorrect. Commodities are social products, and all are produced via labor. The commodity market itself relies on the differences between price and value to re-allocate labor, capital itself is a control system. You cannot divorce a commodity from the very fact that commodities of its type are made by labor, even if you could magic a widget into existence, its price would still be that of the rest of the widgets, because widgets are socially provided in a given socially necessary abstract labor time.

The only way Marx’s argument can be accepted is if you start with the presupposition that commodities are valued by the labor required to produce them.

Again, wrong. Marx's argument is an observation of how labor and capital is allocated, and how capitalist economies function in reality. Marx is not concerned with idyllic, fantasy conditions where wizards can conjure infinite objects, Marx is talking about the concrete world where goods are produced, bought, and sold on a market in a non-random manner.

How this happens that commodities are exchanged at their “value” is a complete mystery by the way, since Marx says it has nothing to do with the conscious considerations of either the buyer or the seller.

Again, no capitalist is going to calculate SNALT, they are going to notice the cost of production and sell above that, meeting the market roughly where similar commodities are sold. Supply and demand therefore regulate price to value, and when this diverges, labor is re-allocated out of less profitable commodities and into more profitable ones, creating a social average. This is the driving force. It isn't intentional on any one capitalist's part, it's capital itself playing the market regulator.

I'm not Chinese, and it's easy enough for Chinese citizens to get VPNs. You aren't going to convince anyone with this level of argumentation, paid or not.

Because this implies they exist outside of the material universe. Relying on gods, supernatural forces, or other impossible phenomena to explain real, existing phenomena gets in the way of actually understanding reality around us, which is critical so that we may actually change reality to suit our own ends.

Why the hell are you jumping to racism and purity tests?

The DPRK actually does have direct elections at all levels for government positions, but regardless, democracy is not "has direct elections," it's rule by the majority.

As for "workers" owning capital, this makes them petite bourgeoisie, in essence petty capitalists. The US Empire is an imperialist country, and so is able to bribe the working classes into siding with capital using the spoils from the global south. Having a business and paying others to work for you, without needing to labor yourself, is being a capitalist, not a worker.

As for the US, going to the store does not make you a capitalist, it makes you a consumer. The people do not decide the price, what decides the price of commodities is the socially necessary labor time going into the commodity, as well as factors like rent, supply and demand, and more that cause price to fluctuate around their values. People do not just think "I will pay 1 dollar for a car" and get it, cost of production is what has the biggest impact on price.

As for leasing land in China, this is why 90% of people own their home there.

No? Not necessarily.

Yes, generally. There's also transport.

Again, not necessarily.

Yes, again.

It does make his argument invalid. Per Marx: “If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour.” This is how you get to the LTV in the argument. Yet it’s just trivially wrong.

Wrt labor/raw materials, you can sell ideas. Commodities aren’t even necessarily material things. Now you could say that ideas require humans, and humans require human labor to be created and raised and nature to nourish them etc etc yet it’s an unjustifiable presupposition that ideas can then be reduced to a mechanical combination of these aspects.

Again, you're trivially wrong. All commodities can be reduced to labor and raw materials, full-stop. Simply claiming that something is "trivially wrong" is not in fact enough to make it trivially wrong. As for "ideas" being sold, mental labor for research and development, etc. is in fact labor, and labor goes into training the skilled labor used for research and development. Again, the Law of Value is generally about the social inputs and social outputs of capitalist economies. Simply saying it's an "unjustifiable presupposition" isn't a counterargument.

No. Value itself is neither exchange-value (which is just a relation between two values) nor use-value (the particularities of which dissolve when considering value), when Marx refers to value he is referring only to the labor-time socially necessary to produce a thing. If you were speaking about specific use values then this is just nonsense in context because you were talking about “the value in a commodity” as what price orbits around, and then you have the category error I went over. You corrected yourself here by saying value can be reduced to just labor instead of being “reduced to labor and natural resources.” Just admit you made a mistake and don’t act like the mix-up is on me.

You can call it a mistake if you want, but I was clearly referencing the fact that call commodities are reducible to labor and natural resources. This is why Marx directly references labor and natural resources as the mother and father of all material wealth. Given that you haven't yet made an actual critique of the Law of Value, this seems more like deflection than anything else.

Sure, and why should this floor be reflective of the amt. of labor required to produce that commodity? Well you can justify this abstractly but in terms of actually making it work, it doesn’t.

Because the price of labor-power is essentially regulated around what can be produced in a day of laboring, with the expectation that this is enough to reproduce a day of laboring. In other words, wages are kept around the level needed for workers to continue the production process in terms of means of consumption. This is reflected in the price of the commodities produced by the labor process.

This has to do with the prev. “mix-up,” you were talking about [[[prices]]] again; commodities as values are only representative of certain expenditures of abstract labor, that is the universal. Use-values are [[[particularities]]] and the entire point of the book is that insofar as they are considered in relation to each other and to the universal which is money (price!), their particular use does not matter (indeed, the particular form of labor employed and any other considerations do not matter), only that they are expenditures of the total abstract social productive capacity of a society.

Again, not a mix-up. Your original critique, if I am being as charitable as possible, is that use-values can be exchanged without having values. This is directly addressed by Marx, in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital.

I’m not anybody’s alt, not that it would matter if I was. I’d imagine if I had a longer history you would pick something else out to use, but this got me to look at your history and I found this post called “Dialectical Materalism: How to Think Like a Marxist” that I’m going to reply to so thx.

Correct, your argument would not matter if you're an alt or not, it's just highly strange that this would be your first comment, days into a thread, many comments deep into it.

All socialist systems thus far have been democratic.

Regarding capitalism, you're referring to an idyllic, fantasy version of capitalism. In the real world, capitalists already control the means of production and distribution, so workers sell the only commodity they can: their labor-power. Since the capitalists hold all of the cards, the price of labor-power is pressed downward towards the customary social price of reproduction, ie as little as possible to prevent revolt while still taking up a full day of labor most days a week to survive.

As for socialism, central planning involves local planning as well. The idea of a single planner hand-planning an entire economy is a farce designed to strawman socialism. In reality, economic planning is already heavily employed in businesses like Amazon, who predict demand and plan production accordingly. Central planning isn't some pie in the sky idea, it worked in the USSR very well, and continues to work in socialist countries today.

This is a bit silly. The famine in China was largely a result of natural disasters, the communists ended famine in a region that had them historically. Further, socialist systems are comprehensively democratic, and cannot be led by a single person unilaterally. Even with party leaders and whatnot, socialist governance is collective.

No, it was not. Once discovered that a famine was occuring, the soviets did what they could to prevent and alleviate it once it had started. The idea of an intentional famine is simply fringe among contemporary historians, same with claims of white genocide in South Africa. For example, serious bourgeois academic sources tend to say it was a failure of planning, rather than intentional and genocide. For instance, Mark Tauger wrote:

[data] indicate that the famine was real, the result of a failure of economic policy, of the 'revolution from above,' rather than of a 'successful' nationality policy against Ukrainians or other ethnic groups.

Tauger believes it was a failure of economic policy, not an intentional attack on ethnic Ukrainians. The 1930s famine was a combination of drought, flooding, and mismanagement. Further, the Kulaks, wealthy bourgeois farmers, magnified matters by killing their own crops in the midst of a famine rather than letting the Red Army collectivize them. The Politburo was also kept in the dark about how bad the famine was getting:

From: Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Fond 3, Record Series 40, File 80, Page 58.

Excerpt from the protocol number of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) “Regarding Measures to Prevent Failure to Sow in Ukraine, March 16th, 1932.

The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow [field crops] in Ukraine.

Signed: Secretary of the Central Committee – J. STALIN

Letter to Joseph Stalin from Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine regarding the course and the perspectives of the sowing campaign in Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.

There are also isolated cases of starvation, and even whole villages [starving]; however, this is only the result of bungling on the local level, deviations [from the party line], especially in regard of kolkhozes. All rumours about “famine” in Ukraine must be unconditionally rejected. The crucial help that was provided for Ukraine will give us the opportunity to eradicate all such outbreaks [of starvation].

Letter from Joseph Stalin to Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.

Comrade Kosior!

You must read attached summaries. Judging by this information, it looks like the Soviet authority has ceased to exist in some areas of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Can this be true? Is the situation in villages in Ukraine this bad? Where are the operatives of the OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate], what are they doing?

Could you verify this information and inform the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party about taken measures.

Sincerely, J. Stalin

Muggeridge and Jones reported on the famine. Völkischer Beobachter reported on it as intentional, and then spread the story around further. Why would the soviets try to starve their own people? It was because of the soviets and collectivization of agriculture that famine was ended, and that's why outside of wartime the 1930s famine was the final famine in those regions, with life expectancies doubling.

Overall, trying to hold on to red scare historiography does absolutely nothing to help the cause of socialism. The soviet archives have provided a wealth of knowledge largely affirming the communist narrative, and debunking liberal and fascist narratives about existing socialism.

Further, the Ukrainian nation was supported by the soviets, to the point that they were often accused of being biased! There was no Russification, instead the soviets promoted a Soviet identity alongside national identities, to protect the identities of the nations while also unifying them.

Returning to the 1930s famine, as I showed above the Central Committee was kept in the dark by the Ukrainian communists as to the famine. They tried to save face by telling the Central Committee that everything was fine and under control, but this was not the case. Drought, flooding, and kulaks burning their crops and killing their livestock as protest against collectivization had destroyed output, and the soviets were still exporting grain in order to trade for industrial equipment with the west (which is what the west wanted in exchange for industrial equipment).

Upon learning the truth of how bad it was getting, the Central Committee was furious. The officials responsible in Ukraine were held accountable, hundreds of tractors and other farming equipment was directed to Ukraine, as well as ~17 million poods (~14ish kg/pood) of grain were redirected towards Ukraine. The Central Committee had been deciding policy based on the reports they were recieving, and these reports were falsified to protect the Ukrainian communist party leadership.

Had famine been the goal, no aid would have been given at all, or perhaps token aid. Sending hundreds of millions of kg of grain to Ukraine is no petty tribute, and punishing Ukrainian party leaders that lied and facilitated famine was the correct course of action for such treason. Counter-revolutionary is correct! They had put their own skin above the peasantry.

In all of this, there was absolutely no reason to have intentionally created a famine. The USSR needed grain for industrial equipment and to feed its people, it would not have sabotaged output deliberately. On top of this, there was existing accusations of the soviets overly supporting Ukrainian national identity, Lenin had given them the Donbass region and in an effort to overturn the Tsar's oppression the soviets highly valued national identity and self-determination.

There is no real evidence of deliberate starvation or creation of famine. All that exists is evidence of tragedy, weather adversity, class conflict between kulaks and the peasantry, and mismanagement in part by the Ukrainian communists and in part caused by disinformation fed to the Central Committee, which changed how they treated Ukraine. Again, they needed grain for industrialization, which they saw as necessary for defense (and this was proven correct as the rapid industrialization in the 20s and 30s is what enabled soviet victory over the Nazis in the 40s).

The 1930s famine wasn't a genocide, but yes, this was the last major famine outside of war time in a region where famine was common. Collectivizing agriculture and advancing in industrialization ended food insecurity.

Communism led to the elimination of famine in areas where famine was historically common.