Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Karl Marx's seminal work, is the book that above all others formed the twentieth century. From Kapital sprung the economic and political systems that at one time dominated half the earth and for nearly a century kept the world on the brink of war.
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What Hacker News says
- this is relatively unremarkable for those with an understanding of wage, labor, profit, price and capital.
capitalism will always seek to reduce labor cost. during the epoch of neoliberalism it achieved great strides in this by reducing labor power through union busting by both thatcher and reagan in the UK and US respectively. it has also effectively curtailed any increase in the minimum wage for nearly 20 years as well as reduced protections, regulation and prosecution for wage theft and overtime pay violations which it maintains as exclusively as civil matters while ensuring theft itself from a merchant in turn is always a criminal matter through the primacy of private property.
to learn more i recommend reading Marx's "Das Kapital," albeit its rather academic. Engels "wage labor" is also a good read to understand why housing is so persistently unaffortable but helps to understand why any other good or service slowly becomes so as well.
- That terrible analogy does not produce a useful mental model on any level. You probably need to read Das Kapital.
- Ha, if you think Marx is objectionable then you really need to read Das Kapital.
- Das Kapital is an analysis/critique of capitalism and (thereby) an excellent economic text.
Marx wants capital to not exist so that's not gonna be very popular with capitalists
- Part of me wonders if capitalism is the solution to the Fermi Paradox because the endless chase of profits is driving us to extinction.
In many Western countries, younger people are facing the prospect of never being able to own a house and never being able to retire. Beyond this basic lack of security, people are realizing the cost of having children is absolutely astronomical. In many parts of the US childcare may be costing $3000/month or more per child.
For many people, pets are proxy children, and yet capitalism (private equity in particular) is ruining that too as all the vet clinics are being bought up so people can be gouged on that front too.
I'm someone who views the Labor Theory of Value [1] to be trivially true. After decades of Red Scare propaganda, Americans in particular dismiss Marx but they don't realize that Marx's most famous work (Das Kapital [2]) is primarily a framework for economic analysis, regardless of your political beliefs. I guess the problem is that as soon as you accept the axiom "there is no value without labor", there is no other conclusion than to see capitalism as the exploitation of surplus labor value.
The US corporate sector produces something like $4 trillion per year in corporate profits [3]. There are over ~210M working age people in the US [4] (about ~262M adults total). So that's ~$20k per worker in surplus labor value at a time when we spend ~2x per-capita on healthcare for worse outcomes and less coverage [5], housing is artifically expensive because we allow people to hoard it and education is unjustifiably expensive.
None of this has to be this way. We've simply chosen to prioritize the interests of fewer than 10,000 people at the expense of everyone else. People need hope. They need their basic necessities taken care of. They need something to live for. We're rapidly heading towards a future where only the rich survive but there's no one left to work in their sprawling estates.
It's also wild that we're seeing the rise of fascism in the West while there are still survivors of the Holocaust still alive. This is absolutely true in Europe too (eg AfD, Reform, National Front, whatever Hungary is). I also think we've passed the point of being able to resolve this with electroal politics. Now it only ends in tyranny or revolution.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital
[3]: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/apr/whats-dri...
[4]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S
[5]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2023/11/health-at-a-gla...
- i suggest everyone who want to know the nature of crypto coin to read Das Kapital
The modern sovereign credit monetary system and the rise of financial innovation products have led most people into the illusion that "commodities are money." However, the truth is quite the opposite.
A very simple perspective: Bitcoin prices are highly correlated with the stock market.
However, this does not mean that cryptos are not worth investing in. It just means they are not inherently more magical than other virtual financial products—at least for now.
