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Did Karl Marx Really Know What He Was Talking About?
American Thinker ^ | 28 Jul, 2021 | Ivan Kramer

Posted on 07/28/2021 3:57:31 AM PDT by MtnClimber

Where does wealth come from? Did Marx really understand this?

Three of the most successful American entrepreneurs in recent history are Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. All three of these brilliant entrepreneurs invested money to make more money, the primary principle of capitalism, and revolutionized the computer and electric car industries. In addition to make fortunes for themselves, these heroes created thousands of jobs and significantly increased wealth around the world.

In 1977 at the age of only 22 years old Steve Jobs along with Stephen Wozniak created Apple Computer by investing their own savings to produce the personal computer Wozniak designed, the Apple II. The product was a great financial success and, step by step, creating irresistible product after irresistible product, Jobs guided Apple into ultimately acquiring today’s market capitalization of over $2 trillion!

Foxconn, a Taiwanese company, actually builds the iPhone for Apple at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou city plant in Henan province, one of China’s poorest provinces. Foxconn provides entry-level jobs for as much as 350,000 poor Chinese youths, primarily 16-29 years of age, from the surrounding farms who have limited alternatives and are glad to be hired.

Although Karl Marx (1818-1883) lived in England during its era of exponential growth in wealth, being a communist, he hated the entrepreneurs (capitalists) and “Jewish usurers” who were responsible for this growth.

In Marx’s view, a company’s profits should belong to the workers who assemble its products. This would mean, for example, that all of Apple’s profits from the iPhone should belong to the entry-level Foxconn workers who assemble it. To Marx, it would be irrelevant that these workers have no idea how the iPhone works, did not and could not design it, and did not invest any money to produce it.

(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...


TOPICS: History; Society
KEYWORDS: communism
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To: Leep

He rarely bathed.

Ewww!


21 posted on 07/28/2021 5:51:15 AM PDT by RushIsMyTeddyBear (RIP my "teddy bear". )
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To: buckalfa

Think about it. What is pretending to be Marxism today is anti-working class and thus anti-Marxist. What is going on is a class war of the Elite Oligarchs who have joined with woke corporations and the Underclass against the independent business and working class. The oligarchs need an army so they have let felons out of prison, defunded police and no longer enforce laws in selected cities controlled by oligarchs. The Oligarchs have bought up all the media so the class war has divided society into those who watch tv and those who don’t and depend on alternative media. TV has now become a dumbing down medium. Schools a dumbing down medium. They are trying to bait the working class into a hot civil war to prove they are white extremists and thus can incarcerate them. But this is an ongoing uncivil war at this moment with the Oligarch-Corporate-Underclass on the offense killing and vaxxing whom they want with impunity and the working class being drive out to other states in the south. Vaxxing and masking is the new class marker. The first question out of the mouth of my “liberal” friends is “have you been vaxxed yet?”. It is a class marker to tell if you have joined them. If not you cannot have a government or corporate job. It is a surreal uncivil war where the working class is portrayed as “racists”. Where does this all go? One side must win totally to bring about stability and so there will be secession and the states will divide. The so-called Marxists will win and take over the states they can dominate.


22 posted on 07/28/2021 5:55:58 AM PDT by WLusvardi (Drudge Fudges)
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To: MtnClimber

Good grief - hypocrisy from the beginning. I’d forgotten that.


23 posted on 07/28/2021 6:07:05 AM PDT by WhattheDickens? (Funny, I didn’t think this was 1984…)
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To: MtnClimber

“Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk”

Apple is basically an electronic luxury goods brand. The ‘Gucci’ of cell phones and portable music devices.

Bill Gates bought Seattle Microcomputer Product’s DOS operating system.

“Founded in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors, the company’s name is a tribute to inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Elon Musk, who contributed most of the funding in the early days, has served as CEO since 2008.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.

“In 1995, Musk, Kimbal, and Greg Kouri founded web software company Zip2 with funds from angel investors. They housed the venture at a small rented office in Palo Alto. The company developed and marketed an Internet city guide for the newspaper publishing industry, with maps, directions, and yellow pages.”

Musk says that before the company became successful, he could not afford an apartment and instead rented an office and slept on the couch and showered at the YMCA, and shared one computer with his brother. According to Musk, ‘The website was up during the day and I was coding it at night, seven days a week, all the time.’ The Musk brothers obtained contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and persuaded the board of directors to abandon plans for a merger with CitySearch. Musk’s attempts to become CEO, a position held by its Chairman Rich Sorkin, were thwarted by the board. Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999. Musk received $22 million for his 7-percent share.”

“In 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company. The startup was one of the first online banks to be federally insured, and, within its initial months, over 200,000 customers joined the service. The company’s investors saw Musk as inexperienced and had him replaced with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year. The following year, X.com merged with online bank Confinity to prevent unnecessary competition. Founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, Confinity had its own money-transfer service, PayPal, which was more popular than X.com’s service.”

“Under Thiel, the company focused on the PayPal service and was renamed PayPal in 2001. In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk—the largest shareholder with 11.7%—received over $100 million.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk


24 posted on 07/28/2021 6:15:18 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
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To: Brian Griffin

A diet of sour grapes gives you indegestion


25 posted on 07/28/2021 6:21:49 AM PDT by bert ( (KE. NP. N.C. +12) Like BLM, Joe Biden is a Domestic Enemy )
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To: MtnClimber

What we have is more like fascism than communism.

With fascism the corporations and fat cats partner with a political leader or political party to use government as a tool.


26 posted on 07/28/2021 6:28:56 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
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To: bert

“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”

George Carlin

Worth reading in its entirety:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/964648-but-there-s-a-reason-there-s-a-reason-there-s-a-reason


27 posted on 07/28/2021 6:34:51 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
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To: a fool in paradise
Bill Gates “created jobs” and lied to Congress about the availability of degreed professionals so he could import cheap labor.

Worth reposting....

28 posted on 07/28/2021 6:44:49 AM PDT by central_va (I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn...)
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To: steve8714
We are the free trade suckers in a mercantile world.

Perfectly stated.

29 posted on 07/28/2021 6:46:22 AM PDT by central_va (I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn...)
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To: MtnClimber

“In 1979 Software Arts introduced the first computer spreadsheet, Visicalc for the Apple II. This ‘killer application’ was extremely popular and fostered extensive sales of the Apple II.”

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_334638


30 posted on 07/28/2021 6:48:02 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
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To: MtnClimber
the core principle of capitalism of investing wealth to earn profit was followed, and it worked!

Marx hated the profit motive because he believed that it causes alienation by preventing autonomy

31 posted on 07/28/2021 6:48:32 AM PDT by mjp (pro-freedom & pro-wealth $)
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To: central_va

Bill Gates and his cheap labor had better fix the problems I see with Edge (two-minute+ startup time) and the time-wasting insubordination of Edge and Windows.

It takes over a minute for my Android phone to become ready to make a phone call. Google has work to do too.


32 posted on 07/28/2021 6:52:20 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
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To: MtnClimber

The creation of wealth is so simple, it’s astonishing that few know what it is, or taught it. Wealth is one of the few things on this earth not created by God. It is created by man, because it’s solely enumerated by the value mankind places on it.

Wealth is created only when the product of labor exceeds the cost of making it. One might argue that land and water are created by God. However, it’s mankind’s responsibility to designate it’s value. It’s why an acre of land in the Sahara Desert is worth far less than one acre of land in Manhattan. Similarly, one ounce of gold buried beneath the earth’s surface is worth nothing until someone puts forth the labor to find it.


33 posted on 07/28/2021 7:12:11 AM PDT by norwaypinesavage (The stoMr. Penkevichne age didn't end because we ran out of stones.)
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To: MtnClimber

Reagan: How do you tell a communist? It’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.


34 posted on 07/28/2021 7:19:13 AM PDT by Gil4 (And the trees are all kept equal by hatchet, ax and saw)
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To: MtnClimber

Marx gives losers an excuse for violently taking power over the vast majority of people who disagree.


35 posted on 07/28/2021 7:39:10 AM PDT by Uncle Miltie (Critical Race Theory: black behavior is so bad it must be whitey's fault.)
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To: MtnClimber

Marx got some things right. Economics really does have a lot to do with politics, attitudes, values, wars, etc. The big failure of Marx is his Labor Theory of Value, upon which his economic and historical theories ultimately rests.

No Karl, it does not create Value when “workers” spend time and effort doing something that no one needs or wants.


36 posted on 07/28/2021 7:58:52 AM PDT by Chewbarkah
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To: MtnClimber

Marx was a Malthusian, did not, could not see that technology provides, not only wealth, but the ability to create free time, destroy feudalistic scarcity-directed thought modes about “survival of the fittest”, and provide for the development of inhospitable land to allow the painless increase of the world’s population to 100 times its present level, send us into space and prevent another extinction level asteroid impact.


37 posted on 07/28/2021 8:16:14 AM PDT by Yollopoliuhqui
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To: MtnClimber

Marx, as a typical German philosopher of his time, applied Hegel’s dialectic to economics and to what he called “class consciousness”. Putting aside his turgid Hegelian prose, Marx did have some fundamental insights which seem to me to be unquestionably true. Class consciousness is real, and it does evolve in a dialectic fashion. The mistake revolutionaries and historical communists make is in assuming that one can short-circuit history by skipping over the dialectic to achieve an idealistic result. You cannot. Class consciousness, our society, and what we consider economic norms, will change naturally through the passage of time, they will go wherever they must, it will take as long as it will allowing inherent contradictions emerge and be resolved, and will not be hurried along by revolution.


38 posted on 07/28/2021 8:46:49 AM PDT by PUGACHEV
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To: central_va

Microsoft where all workers are temps for a reason.

Cheap labor.


39 posted on 07/28/2021 8:55:15 AM PDT by Vaduz (women and children to be impacIQ of chimpsted the most.)
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To: MtnClimber

Marx was a lazy bum. He lived off of others all his life.


40 posted on 07/28/2021 9:42:39 AM PDT by minnesota_bound (I need more money. )
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