Comment author: Mass_Driver 16 July 2010 05:55:01AM 0 points [-]

No, no, I can't take credit. I've read The Marx-Engels Reader cover to cover, as well as some interesting neo-Marxist thoughts on time-as-labor by a guy named something-or-other Cohen.

In general, I think Marx was wrong -- his hypothesis about Life, the Universe, and Everything was just far too complex to have any serious chance of being wholly or even mostly correct, and history has been justly unkind to his predictions. As to the single point of time being a useful way to analyze labor, though, well, that's a much simpler idea, and has not been disproven, and has not received much attention lately.

That said, if you have specific suggestions for what I should Google, I'm all ears.

Comment author: dominov 16 July 2010 07:16:07AM -4 points [-]

Complex is very far from what I would call Marx's objective hypotheses. Perhaps you are confusing Marx's analyses of the capitalist modus specifically, such as he did in Capital, with dialectical materialism in general; the former is naturally very complex, as it is the analysis of a subjective and transitory superstructural expression of dialectical materialism in general, the latter being, if I may take this liberty, akin to Bayes' Law in being simple in expression yet complex in result.

To put it another way, it is easy to confuse Marx's subjective analysis of a transitory form, which he did most prominently in Capital, with the broad, historical, sociological, objective principles of the materialist conception of history, dialectical materialism, which he expressed in parts throughout his writing.

Additionally I, for one, would hold that contrary to the common perception of Marx having failed at his predictions that Marx's writings on capitalism apply more to the current state of affairs than to his own.

Anyway, on reading back over your post, I'm not so sure now exactly what you are trying to do; but reading the literature on surplus labor, etc. can never hurt!

Comment author: dominov 16 July 2010 04:55:32AM *  0 points [-]

Your first point is a very old and well-analyzed one amongst Marxists, in the sense of time-as-labor, "time" being the usual approximate metric for the measure of labor. Indeed, depending on how one interprets your question, it may be that you independently stumbled upon one of the key points of Marxian analysis and the concept of surplus-value.

Perhaps with that qualification some Googling may serve as a productive use of your time.

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 03 November 2009 11:54:56PM 1 point [-]

It depends. The first few years may be like this as you take a bunch of classes in areas your probably aren't interested in, but if you choose a major you like, it gets better as you schedule becomes dominated by those classes. Your own personality is another important factor here.

Comment author: dominov 04 November 2009 12:07:46AM 1 point [-]

Ach, I had not realized that required classes in college might feel as useless as required classes in high school. But perhaps college classes will be more rigorous and less likely to induce I-Could-Learn-This-On-Wikpedia Syndrome. I can but hope.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 November 2009 10:34:39AM 5 points [-]

So, I'm having one of those I-don't-want-to-go-to-school moments again. I'm in my first year at a university, and, as often happens, I feel like it's not worth my time.

As far as math goes, I feel like I could learn all the facts my classes teach on Wikipedia in a tenth of the time--though procedural knowledge is another matter, of course. I have had the occasional fun chat with a professor, but the lecture was never it.

As far as other subjects go, I think forces conspired to make me not succeed. I had a single non-math class, though it was twice the length of a normal class and officially two classes. It was about ancient Greece and Rome, and we had to read things like Works and Days and the Iliad. Afterwards, we were supposed to write a paper about depictions of society in the two works or something. I never wrote the paper, and I dropped the class.

Is school worth it for the learning? How about for the little piece of paper I get at the end?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread: November 2009
Comment author: dominov 03 November 2009 11:52:10PM 1 point [-]

Oh god, this is still an issue for people in college? And here I was assuming that after I got out of high school I wouldn't think along these tempting-yet-ultimately-ruinous lines ever again.