This time we start with my 12th sentence!

PS weren't you bailing? You're just shitposting in the other reply now.

Yes, send NYPD to the synagogues. First they'll listen to him and it definitely wouldn't result in a federal crackdown.

????

He did send NYPD to the synagogue. You seem to not know this? You think it is a hypothetical and absurd? It seems you don't even know what I am referencing? Oh dear.

Again pure political idealism, daydreaming bullshit, immune to the actual prevailing conditions

The irony.

In one sentence you acknowledge he's a single guy, and then in the next you demand he perform political feats that require the backing of a disciplined, fully developed workers' party.

These are not really in contradiction if you omit the part I didn't say: "requires". A disciplined party with sufficient structure and internal organization can make that happen, it is a force for this. Otherwise it is... just one guy, a bourgeois politician, and you're betting on him having that discipline all on his own (of course that one guy basically never does). Discussing your completely imaginary strategizing on Mamdani's part is pointless, discussing strategic retreat in the context of a disciplined party could have value. That is what I said. You have misrepresented me yet again, and I am not speaking in riddles. Just read carefully and speak honestly.

Do you believe the DSA is a fully developed workers' party?

Obviously not lol.

Meanwhile I'm going here in reality, pointing out he's normalizing socialist politics at the municipal level and that's an acceptable progression of our politics

Oh now it's socialist politics at the municipal level, not antizionism? I wonder how often you've rote repeated this. Certainly more variations on in this conversation than anything acknowledging what I have said in reply.

Next up: skipping over 30 of my sentences in between what you quoted! I wonder what intervened.

Reducing a deep materialist and structural critique into a mere argument over vocabulary and definitions, Marx is not doing linguistic analysis; he is doing an ontological and material analysis of social forms.

Oh I didn't reduce it, Marx did! It's called Chapter 1: Commodities. That's one of the sentences you have conveniently pretended did not exist. He broke it down so folks could systematically understand him and his quite subtle points critiquing political economy. He spent much effort on definitions, relations, and how to present them in a particular ordering. The idea that Marx was not heavy in semantics is truly amazing, and the fact that you're doubling down so hard on this is... well I don't know quite what the best description is. It's like embarrassing, but also revealing? And shameless? It's like you're daring every person who has read Marx and knows what words mean to disrespect you.

Semantics is not only "linguistic analysis". While it is about language, its focus is on meaning of lamguage, what is meant when saying something, what a term actually means (often multiple options of course). So when Marx says, "this is what a commodity is", he's focusing heavily on semantics - he's specifically not using the common understanding, but is constructing his own redundant lexicon so as to best explain his understanding, and in doing so relating the two. When he talks about what value is, he is focusing on semantics and most who are naive to Marx have a lot of trouble understanding value as a result, since the word has many other meanings that can easily distract. Every time Marx some comment like, "critics suppose [term] is [x], but is is actually [y]", he is making a semantic point, actually the same kind I have been making and that makes your belly ache like nothing else, apparently.

Ontology is virtually inseparable from semantics. And I am convinced you don't know what materialism is in this context. Regarding these ideas, in general, Marx was primarily focused on social relations, with those of economic production being primary. I was going to keep talking about materialism but I don't think I'm speaking to a particularly receptive audience.

When he breaks down the commodity into use-value and exchange-value, he isn't saying, "People are using the wrong words for things."

Oh, is that all semantics is? When I tell you you're using a word wrong? This explains your behavior, but it is also incorrect.

He is saying, "The material reality of capitalist production forces physical goods to take on these dual, contradictory social properties."

Oh, no. Incorrect. Commodities are not just physical goods, though the examples usually are to help people understand. And the purpose of dividing up these various values is for... guess what... semantic clarity. Marx is divvying up the forms of "value" so their properties, hidden in plain sight, can be explained in isolation, and so that value, what he really cares about, can receive focus. Value was previously conflated when it came to these 3, you see, inasmuch as value was previously described. This has to be deconstructed for Marx to make his points.

That is real abstraction, not mere linguistics, and it's very liberal to confuse that reality

Just word salad over and over again, recycling various words that puff up your chest or something. Marx's work there is specifically a critique of political economy, of pointing out errors in the overall approaches of classical political economists, beginning with a fundamental deconstruction of commodities that can be built upon later. It involves both semantics and she, abstraction, and more than that as well. You're painting yourself into a little dichotomous box that simply doesn't apply. I say "X has Y" and you chime in with "but X also has Z, lib!", thinking yourself clever.

Also Marx in that paragraph is not "correcting past and contemporary political economists' views on the labor theory of value." He's not talking to economists at all, Adam Smith and David Ricardo his two biggest influences, already had that real abstraction locked down, he's talking to the layperson and building to an explanation of the concept of Socially Necessary Labor Time

Incorrect. He was in part referring to a criticism of the labor theory of value, one that says, "if more labor time means more value, why isn't the slow worker's commodity more valuable?" This hews close to Ricardo's definitions and certainly his critics'.

Also by trivializing Marx's work as a battle of linguistics

Repetitive

you completely miss the fact he isn't simply saying bourgeois economists chose the wrong labels

Incorrect. You keep saying "X has Z" as if it contradicts "X has Y" by default. This is such a basic error if thinking, I can only see it as a lie that I said: "Marx only wrote about semantics".

Second time you did that. I wonder if there will be more.

but that the common analysis of capitalism in his day made two fundamental structural errors: Naturalizing Capitalism and Fetishizing Surface Appearances while ignoring the underlying dynamics of social production, that's not a question of semantic elucidation, that's a failure to perceive structural historical reality

More word salad. The pieces kind of make some sense in isolation, but trying to make sense of them together might be impossible. Marx was of course talking about even more than that, but sure naturalizing capitalism was one aspect he critiqued and stated pretty plainly as a historical truth regarding modes of production. Regarding fetishization I'm not really sure what you're trying to refer to. In the part we are discussing it is a social property of commodities where capitalist production obscures origins and puts, in consideration, almost fantastical properties on the commodity itself. Both of these are highly semantic in their discourse, of course, especially the latter in how he describes the way in which properties and statements are made about commodities themselves as if they have them, rather than a relation being highly obscured.

I don't want to try and guess what you might mean by "structural historical reality". I think it's just words you think sound meaningful.

You cannot linguistically "correct" commodity fetishism, because it is built into the objective structure of how a market economy operates. It requires a transformation of the material mode of production, not just some clearer dictionary

Oh dang now my whole argument about linguistically correcting commodity fetishism is out the window. Dang it! My life's work!

Hate to break it to you, but your argument is structurally rooted in liberal philosophy and epistemology, as if capitalism is simply a conceptual error or a giant linguistic misunderstanding.

Oh wow fake nonexistent Chana says a lot of weird things in your pattern of speech, don't they? I wonder why my "argument" that you're referring to even is in this context.

In Marxism, capitalism is a physical, violent rearrangement of human labor and resources, Marx wasn't trying to win a debate by redefining words; he was mapping the mechanics of an objective, physical system.

Not entirely, as you're describing something in the vein of vulgar materialism. A common mistake for those who haven't read Marx. The dialectic is a bit more nuanced than that, exploring both objective and subjective in his analysis. Remember, Marx also critiques philosophers of only trying to understand the world, saying instead the point is to change it. Though this is now the third or fourth straw man about what I said regarding Marx and semantics. Exact same format, even.

Also your conception implies all a politician needs to do is say the right things, do the right things and perform symbolically in a "socialist" manner and everything else will fall into place, under a worldview like that no wonder you perceive anyone explaining prevailing conditions and structural barriers as "excuse making"

Pure invention.