On May 5th, 1818, Karl Marx, hero of the international proletatiat, was born. His revolution of Socialist theory reverberates throughout the world carries on to this day, in increasing magnitude. Every passing day, he is vindicated. His analysis of Capitalism, development of the theory of Scientific Socialism, and advancements on dialectics to become Dialectical Materialism, have all played a key role in the past century, and have remained ever-more relevant throughout.

He didn’t always rock his famous beard, when he was younger he was clean shaven!

Some significant works:

Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The Civil War in France

Wage Labor & Capital

Wages, Price, and Profit

Critique of the Gotha Programme

Manifesto of the Communist Party (along with Engels)

The Poverty of Philosophy

And, of course, Capital Vol I-III

Interested in Marxism-Leninism, but don’t know where to start? Check out my “Read Theory, Darn it!” introductory reading list!

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mlOP
      213·
      1 day ago

      Can you give an example? It could be small manufacturing, the small handicraftsman, guild work, etc. Being paid money for labor isn’t exclusive to Capitalism.

      • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
        122·
        1 day ago

        Ceramics (roof tiles and pots) were manufactured on an industrial scale in Rome for example. They employed workers and produced massive numbers of products.

        What is your distinction between employing people for money and capitalism?

        • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
          8·
          18 hours ago

          Also, the surplus in nearly all the periods of ancient Rome, was still largely an agrarian surplus, extracted either from slaves, or from feudal workers / colonates in the territories outside the city.

          The city / empire survived not by its own products and a commodity-producing economy, but by feeding an agrarian surplus off its many colonies.

        • CarlMarks@lemmygrad.ml
          10·
          21 hours ago

          Most of the Roman low and medium skill artisans were slaves, actually.

          But capitalism is best recognized by the proliferation of commodities, as it is made up of various wage labor capitalist enterprises producing large quantities of fungible goods for market. A chair is a chair is a chair and you can buy 50 varieties of basically the same thing at the furniture store. Under capitalism, all economic life is governed by this: you work a wage labor job and you buy everything else (commodities made by other wage laborers).

          Rome did not have such a system. A vastly larger proportion of goods were made at home by oneself or by servants or by slaves. When goods were purchased they would have mostly been produced by slaves or petty bourgeois artisans or apprentices. Wage laborers still existed, but they were not typical.

          An important part of Marxist analysis is to focus on the shift from quantitative to qualitative in social development. The high proportion of wage laborers is something that typefies capitalism, but wage laborers have existed for a long time. At some point there was a watershed moment - or watershed many decades - where the material forces that increased this proportion crossed various thresholds to create a new ruling class that became dominant and started throwing their weight around (capitalists). The capitalist class was in no way dominant in Rome.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mlOP
          203·
          1 day ago

          Very interesting example! I’d say it’s definitely a proto-Capitalist example, undoubdtedly. I wouldn’t call it Capitalist out right, however, for a few reasons:

          1. Ceramics manufacture was relatively unique among the entire Roman economy. The Roman economy was largely slave-driven.

          2. Ceramics manufacture itself was technologically limited. The vast majority of what went into creating a pot, for example, was human hands, the Kiln was really the largest technical instrument. As a consequence, there wasn’t continuous iterative improvement at voracious scales as is characteristic of Capitalism.

          I would classify it closer to a large version of manufacturing workers, but certainly could have expanded into Capitalism had the Roman society at large developed similar structures, giving rise to a dominant bourgeois class and the abolition of slave labor in favor of wage labor proletarians. The context of the entire economy is critical.

          I think I answered the differences between paying people in general and Capitalism specifically, but I also recommend Engels’ Principles of Communism, the first few pages go over what makes Capitalism distinct from pre-Capitalist economic formations.

          • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
            75·
            1 day ago

            I was asking to clarify, because it sounded like your definition of capitalism was something like ‘uses industrial machinery to allow for unskilled work.’ By that definition, I agree that by definition capitalism didn’t exist till after the industrial revolution, since industrial machinery didn’t exist yet. But I disagree that capitalism requires industrial machinery.

            • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
              7·
              18 hours ago

              Feudalism also employed some industrial machinery (water wheels for milling grain is one example). But the primary energy source was still muscle power, the primary product was agricultural produce, and the workers were peasants tied to the land, not mobile wage workers producing consumer goods.

              Marxists consider these important distinctions that define entire historical periods, even if they’re still both examples of class society.

              • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mlOP
                7·
                17 hours ago

                Great points, kicking myself that I forgot to mention the key aspects of production being largely agricultural, and workers largely immobile, especially. The ability to set up factories in cities with close cooperation is what took the sparks to a blaze.

            • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mlOP
              141·
              24 hours ago

              That’s not quite my definition. In order for Private Property to become the dominant aspect of society, technological advancements needed to be made to allow a small class of people to dominate society through ownership of the Means of Production. Marx explains it quite simply here:

              The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

              Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

              Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

              We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

              • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
                11·
                23 hours ago

                But you’d say that capitalism requires the technological advancements of the industrial revolution by definition?

                • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mlOP
                  9·
                  23 hours ago

                  I’d say the formation of Capitalist production depends on the development of certain technologies to allow for the creation of large industry and division of society into classes of bourgeois and proletarian. Engels sums it up in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

                  Prior to capitalist production, i.e., in the Middle Ages, small-scale production generally prevailed, based upon the workers’ private ownership of their means of production: the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman or serf, and the handicrafts in the towns. The instruments of labour – land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the hand tool – were the instruments of labour of single individuals, adapted for individual use, and, therefore, of necessity puny, dwarfish, circumscribed. But for this very reason they normally belonged to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day was precisely the historic role of the capitalist mode of production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In Part IV of Capital Marx gives a detailed account of how the bourgeoisie has historically accomplished this since the fifteenth century through the three phases of simple co-operation, manufacture and large-scale industry. But as is also shown there, the bourgeoisie could not transform these limited means of production into mighty productive forces without at the same time transforming them from individual means of production into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the hand-loom and the blacksmith’s hammer were replaced by the spinning machine, the power-loom and the steam hammer, and the individual workshop by the factory commanding the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. Like the means of production, production itself changed from a series of individual operations into a series of social acts, and the products from individual into social products. The yarn, the cloth and the metal goods that now came out of the factory were the common product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: “I made that, this is my product.”

                  • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
                    13·
                    14 hours ago

                    I don’t think the Marxist definition of capitalism lines up with the colloquial definition. Colloquially, it’s thought of as systems in which money is exchanged for goods and services. As opposed to communism, where it is not. (These are both oversimplified)

                    When people say capitalism has been around for thousands of years, what they mean is the colloquial definition. Redefining their terms with the Marxist version doesn’t address their actual point.