The Mezunian

Die Positivität ist das Opium des Volkes, aber der Spott ist das Opium der Verrückten

Karl Marx Describes Market Trade in the Most Elegant & Accurate Way

From Grundrisse 051:

In fact of course, this ‘productive’ worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn’t give a damn for the junk.

I love how Marx emphasized that this shit was “crappy.” That’s right up there with “trashy garbage” or “pissy urine.”

‘Nother great line in which Marx is defending his homie, Adam Smith, gainst critics (or a’least certain critics):

What the other economists advance against it is either horse-piss [sic] […]

Producing horse piss is 1 o’ those things like belief in Say’s Law that ne’er goes out o’ style.

Hilariously, Marx is mo’ vociferous gainst people who might believe in the “mud pie” version o’ the labor theory than the most anti-Marx Austrian-schooler:

Or2 the modern economists have turned themselves into such sycophants of the bourgeois that they want to demonstrate to the latter that it is productive labour when somebody picks the lice out of his hair, or strokes his tail, because for example the latter activity will make his fat head – blockhead – clearer the next day in the office.

Marxist.org does note in the contents page, “Marx did not intend it for publication as is, so it can be stylistically very rough in places.” No shit.

Part o’ me wishes there were mo’ “uncensored versions” o’ famous economics books, like General Theory or Paul Samuelson’s Economics. I can only imagine an early version o’ “Postulates of the Classical Economics”: “So these fucking retards Say, J. S. Mill, & Marshall spew some horse-shit that savings don’t exist.”


Footnotes:

  • [1] I can only assume that “Grundrisse” is German for “horse-piss.”
  • [2] Yes, Marx stops a sentence in the middle o’ an either-or statement, having not learned o’ a semicolon yet.
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Posted in Politics