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No diss taken, you just summarized my experience with the book perfectly. It feels like I'm getting 30% of what he's saying, but it's an interesting book.
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03-05-2025 01:35 PM
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I was too busy with my MBA curriculum. Marx was not an arbiter of proper language use.
Originally Posted by Litterick
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Marx's economic work was well within the "classical" school (Smith, Ricardo, etc.), based on labor theories of value. He used "commodity" in the sense the rest of them did: something that takes human labor to produce and which has exchange value (i.e., can be bought or sold). With Marx there' more to it than that because of the psychological and socio-political dimensions he added in his discussion of commodities, but no need to go down that path. The classical sense of commodity is much broader than the narrow sense used more often today of a fungible good, but if the discussion is about the psychology of collectibles, it's the more useful sense. Originally Posted by nevershouldhavesoldit
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Whether you cite Adam Smith, David Ricardo, or Karl Marx, their definition of “commodity” is broader than how the term is used in modern economics.
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I actually have nothing against Marx btw. He was a classical economist influenced by the French Revolution, especially Jacobin ideologies. His work was an analysis of capitalism, not a blueprint for totalitarianism. Marx didn’t create Mao or Stalin.
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In most modern economics contexts, yes. But if, for example, you're analyzing the phenomenon of collectibles through the lens of an idea like "commodity fetishization" it might make sense to use it the classical sense. There are people with actual economics doctorates using modern analytic and mathematics techniques who do that. It's not just Litterick Originally Posted by omphalopsychos
Anyway, I'm not trying to argue you revising how you use the word. All I'm saying is that there's more to "commodity" then "widely available, fungible thing that trades in markets." You could probably spend a lifetime in certain types of businesses and not ever realize this. But if you spend a very short amount of time reading up on the history of economics or looking at the work of people influenced by Marx's economic work you probably will. It was immediately obvious to me what Litterick was referring to.
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Yes and no. He personally was not totalitarian in outlook and would have been horrified by Mao or Stalin. But he did invent and implement the idea of a party acting as the vanguard of revolution, and systematically marginalize viewpoints based on cooperation and consent, and there is a through line from him to Lenin. His scholarly work attempted to unify the objective and prescriptive. It wasn't just analysis for the sake of analysis and truth. Originally Posted by omphalopsychos
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Everything you say is true. I'm not saying I agree with everything he said, I just don't see him as "evil" or whatever people want to say. Dudes just be trying to understand and improve the world and everyone's at least a little bit wrong.
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Originally Posted by omphalopsychos
I think we’re in the same basic place in this subject. A very similar conversation could be had about “fetishism”. Suffice to say “commodity fetishism” does not mean “has sex with pork bellies.”
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It's a bit like physics, where you have specific use of a word like energy or work.
Not that anyone in the wider public EVER gets confused by that lol.
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Just another guitar demise thread. Nothing to see here.
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Least of all by Marxian Physics. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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For those into the “demise” threads, may I suggest getting into tenor banjo or Hawaiian steel guitar? Originally Posted by 2bornot2bop
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