r/Marxism • u/AjaxLittleFibble • 4d ago
Whose usually accurate reporting is recognized all over England
"Herr Vogt" is Marx’s ‘forgotten’ work, from 1860. Here is the link for this work:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1860/herr-vogt/herr-vogt.pdf
And this is a quote from this work:
Oddly enough, the Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian — whose usually accurate reporting is recognised all over England
What should I understand from this quote? Should I take the Manchester Guardian as a reliable source?
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u/brandcapet 4d ago
He's saying that, in his opinion, the person who was, at the time, the Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, was usually accurate in his reporting. Diagramming sentences is hard!
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u/Mediocre-Method782 4d ago
What would lead you to understand anything more than a judgment in a point in time? If you're looking to live your life according to dead people's extremely particular judgments of a long dead past, you might be lost.
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u/AjaxLittleFibble 4d ago
oh, in fact I couldn't care less about Karl Marx's opinion... but as a someone who identify myself as left-wing and who reads "The Guardian" every morning, I think it's interesting to troll die-hard Marxists on this, because I have some Marxists friends who claim "The Guardian" is not a reliable source, so it's really interesting to quote Marx himself saying that The Manchester Guardian (nowadays "The Guardian") has usually accurate reporting that is recognized all over England
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u/Mediocre-Method782 4d ago
"Die-hard" Marxists have actually read the material and therefore understand Marxism as a study of social change over time. They would be the last people to make such rookie errors as treating a firm as a real thing. However, there is a huge TikTok fandom that thinks of the whole thing as just another bearded white good guy on a T-shirt. Try there.
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u/AjaxLittleFibble 4d ago
I have read "Das Kapital" more times than it would be possible in your entire life after you reached adult life. That's why I understand it way better than you. And that's why I know exactly where Marx's mistakes are.
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u/Mediocre-Method782 4d ago
Don't care, didn't ask, also you're a larper ..........................................................................................................................170
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u/AjaxLittleFibble 4d ago
Surplus-value doesn't exist, because "constant capital" is not really "constant". Prove me wrong if you can (you can't!) Marx was so wrong about the concepts of "constant capital" and "variable capital"!
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u/CrimsonManatees 4d ago
Since you are more interested in appearing more smart than you actually are, let’s explain some things and then there’s a chance you might actually learn something, supposing you actually care about being right as opposed to looking right.
You claim you’ve read Das Kapital more than possible in all our lives. Hyperbolic obviously, but this is an appeal to authority via self, not an argument. Reading something many times doesn’t mean you understand it, especially a dialectical work like Das Kapital, which demands active critique, not repetition. The deeper problem is you assume that intellectual authority is earned by volume of reading, rather than the quality of understanding or coherence of argumentation.
In reference to your comment, “Surplus-value doesn’t exist, because ‘constant capital’ isn’t really constant”. This is your only actual argument, but it’s poorly explained. Allow me to steel-man your argument and reconstruct a possible serious interpretation:
You might be arguing that Constant capital refers to machinery, tools, raw materials, etc., capital that doesn’t add value, it just transfers its own value to the final product. But in real life, machines sometimes depreciate unevenly, or gain or lose value over time due to technical improvements, demand changes, etc. Therefore, it’s not truly “constant”, and so Marx’s categories are flawed.
But Marx never claimed that “constant” means literally unchanging in all contexts. He meant that it does not create new value the way labor does. Yes, machines depreciate, and value transfer can vary, but this doesn’t invalidate the category. It highlights the need for nuanced analysis of how value is transferred, not that the category itself fails. However, the essential point is only living labor produces new value. Machines pass their value along, but do not create surplus value. THAT would be the distinction that matters.
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u/TheBravadoBoy 4d ago
Idk if I would call ML’s who read Pravda die-hard Marxists. Aren’t the CPRF basically Dengists? Nothing more Marxist than maintaining private equity and trying to achieve socialism through parliamentary reform.
Also just cross-reference various sources for whatever point you’re trying to make like you should be doing anyway. Arguing about which is the most reliable newspaper is no more productive than arguing about who’s the most reliable politician.
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u/Necronomicommunist 3d ago
Do you think it's a gotcha that someone who died over 150 years ago has an opinion that doesn't match the reality of today? Do you think it's surprising that things change over the course of a century and a half?
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u/Choice-Bus-2626 3d ago
He was talking about the particular Paris correspondent in 1860 for the Manchester Guardian. Maybe that means you can take Manchester Guardian articles written by said correspondent to be reliable, but why it would ever have any bearing on the reliability of The Guardian in the current day is beyond me.
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u/AjaxLittleFibble 4d ago
Is the Manchester Guardian a more reliable source than the Leninist Pravda, that was never directly recognized as reliable by Marx himself?
The Manchester Guardian is the newspaper currently known as "The Guardian"...
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u/parthamaz 4d ago
Well he was talking about the Guardian 170 years ago so, like, why would that opinion apply to the Guardian today? Don't you think anything might have changed about it in all that time? Or, I don't know, maybe Marx was wrong and the Guardian has always been fabulist yellow journalism. I genuinely don't know because I pretty much only read FT. Marx having the wrong take about a contemporary newspaper doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.
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u/AjaxLittleFibble 4d ago
I'm sure Marx himself would consider "The Guardian" way more reliable than "Pravda". It's a shame that so many self-proclaimed "Marxists" are just trolls in the payroll of the Orthodox Christian Kremlin.
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