As if Marx's work doesn't build from the work of previous economists INCLUDING Smith! Pure idealist nonsense but what else do you expect from liberals.
I am like 40 pages in Capital and Smith has already been mentioned like twice. These fucking libs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/jk9on3/half_of_reddit_be_like/
The comments are exactly what you'd expect, just making up weird interactions with supposed internet communist strawmen telling them insane things like "communism doesn't have economics", or the typical smug shit about "muh gommunism doesn't work" nonsense you usually get from these simpletons (one guy says it "eschews empirical evidence" which is amazing levels of cognitive dissonance coming from these dorks), and then the smallest categories are A) people admitting they haven't read Capital or read either (which in reality is almost 100% of them), and B) or people who have read both pointing out how fucking stupid everyone sounds saying this shit.
This is how you can tell someone hasn't read a word of Smith. Marx fucking loved Smith, constantly quotes him and builds on his ideas.
You can tell none of them have ever read The Wealth of Nations, because they would've labelled Smith a dirty commie for some of his takes.
For a really long time I've had this idea for a twitter account called something like @MarxorSmith where I'd put up a quote like this one and ask people to guess whether Adam Smith or Karl Marx said it.
Landlords often pay the city council to like them.
Mine is pretty cool, lets me pay rent whenever i want and since lockdown they have been consistently asking if i need help financially
Over the years i have observed that their niceness is inversely proportional to the amount of property they own
Adam Smith:
“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
r/Neoliberal:
Good. :yes-chad:
Yep, it's a dumb meme page and these dorks don't have any understanding of any of this shit beyond the fact that neolibs are the "winning team" and thus you can be a smug dipshit without actually knowing anything.
They might have that perception because they are getting rightfully bullied for their shit takes out there in the posting war o7
Wealth of Nations actually dovetails nicely into Marx
It's almost as if Marx read the book and wrote Capital as a constructive response that fleshed out the position of labor in the context of Smith's capitalism. That the books are two sides of the same coin, and Smith doesn't even directly endorse capitalism as a good way to run society.
As a Marxist, I look at Adam Smith as an economist who was examining the necessary advancement of political economy. The wealth of nations is a book that mostly observes the emergence of a new economic system. We all believe in historical materialism, Adam Smith fits right in for us because he advocated for a newer and more efficient economic system which was an improvement over the mercantilism of the day.
He also correctly identified the contradictions and drawbacks of Capitalism just as it was getting started. I never read his other book but it’s the opposite of “men only act in their self interest” or so I’ve heard.
No no no, you're wrong. You don't like Adam Smith because it's made up nonsense, you're like the half (HALF!) of reddit that loves Capital, which by the context of this post in supposed to understand is the real made up nonsense.
Everyone who loves smith at the expense of Marx has never read either.
21st century capitalism, which is truthfully the most liberal form of capitalism to ever exist, is still not remotely in the ballpark level of liberalism that Smith wrote in support of, and his followers such as Henry George wrote solutions around how to reach towards. The neoliberal sub has some people who like to pretend they are liberal ideologues in the above vision, but theyre really just people who want to uphold the status quo.
The original framers of liberal thought had deeply held egalitarian beliefs, they did not support inherited wealth, they found any form of rent seeking to be totally immoral and destructive m The value Marx provided was in saying that these are problems that are inherently unsolvable under a broader liberal world order. And further Marxist intellectuals built upon how liberal capitalism hands far too much control over the flow of information to monied elites totally giving them control of any and all governments.
Go talk to people on the sub, none of them have any real conception of power except for the occasional neocon, and those folks don't even pretend to give a shit about egalitarian values that smith talked about constantly.
Most of the folks in that tradition call themselves anarchists nowadays.
Okay then I will go read the wealth of nations
But the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind
Am I supposed to be supporting capitalism yet?
Do they forget that Das Capital is just a response to Wealth of Nations using it's discoveries about the operations of capital and imperialism to form a contrast with Marx and Engels findings about the operations of labor and the colonized? I really don't think any of these morons have read, or even skimmed either book.
...
"Labour, it must be remembered, is the ultimate price which is paid for everything, and in countries where labour is equally well regarded, the money price of labour will be in proportion to that of the subsistence of the labourer. But gold and silver will naturally exchange for a greater quantity of subsistence in a rich than in a poor country, in a country which abounds with subsistence than in one which is but indifferently supplied with it."
And
"Even the Peruvians, the more civilised nation of the two, though they made use of gold and silver as ornaments, had no coined money of any kind. Their whole commerce was carried on by barter, and there was accordingly scarce any division of labour among them. Those who cultivated the ground were obliged to build their own houses, to make their own household furniture, their own clothes, shoes, and instruments of agriculture. The few artificers among them are said to have been all maintained by the sovereign, the nobles, and the priests, and were probably their servants or slaves."
Which I think is meant to be a bad thing? But it sounds pretty rad.
He also got the classes right, bourgeoise, proletarian, and peasant:
"The whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country, or what comes to the same thing, the whole price of that annual produce, naturally divides itself, it has already been observed, into three parts; the rent of land, the wages of labour, and the profits of stock; and constitutes a revenue to three different orders of people; to those who live by rent, to those who live by wages, and to those who live by profit. These are the three great, original, and constituent orders of every civilised society, from whose revenue that of every other order is ultimately derived."
"When the public deliberates concerning any regulation of commerce or police, the proprietors of land never can mislead it, with a view to promote the interest of their own particular order; at least, if they have any tolerable knowledge of that interest. They are, indeed, too often defective in this tolerable knowledge. They are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind which is necessary in order to foresee and understand the consequences of any public regulation. "
Adam Smith says landlords are dummies and defund the police
Marx literally references Adam Smith in the first fucking page of Capital.
giving them too much credit. 98% of Reddit think Marx literally killed a gazilion people by himself during the 20th century.
Half of Marx is him just looking at political economy and going "well, let's assume that is true..." while smugly giggling under his breath.
Just happy the powdered wig phase had passed by Marx' time, that'd have been so lame. Though he probably couldn't have afforded one but still, that shit's so dumb
Look a relevant quote I don't understand from a waxy, animatronic Marx
it’s about hegelian negation of the negation
if you have x and you negate it you get -x, and then if you negate -x you do not get x again. you get - -x. from x to negated-x to negated-negated-x, but never back to x itself.
if you negate mercantilism and get capitalism, then if you negate capitalism you won’t get mercantilism, you’ll get double negated mercantilism or the negation of the negation. if you think marx is a determinist then the negation of the negation of mercantilism would be socialism. this is obviously incredibly crude retelling of it. i hope someone starts a dialectic correcting the issues caused by my making the point so crude.
The synthesis is Marx in drag with a glorious Mage Simpson do. No I will not explain
