Actually, Marxists got into quite a fight against other leftists in the early days because they were opposed to equity. Marxists are, in theory, only for equality of opportunity, hence why Marxists countries like the USSR had things like pay by commission, higher pay for certain jobs, etc...
Marx is the poster child for equality of outcome. Would be very interested to know where you heard he stood for equal opportunity.
For example he is famous for saying "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" i.e. everyone works as hard as they can yet gets the same pay, because everyone's "need" is the same. Maybe adjusted by a few exceptions like family size and medical conditions, but the point of this is to separate how hard you work from what you get.
That is literally just false. That quote comes from "Critique of the Gotha Programme", and what it really means is that people have unequal capabilities and unequal needs, so that what people should receive cannot be equal, instead, it should follow from needs and abilities. In that text, Marx explains it by saying:
"one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal."
"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right."
"The elimination of all social and political inequality,” rather than “the abolition of all class distinctions,” is similarly a most dubious expression."
Lenin also says:
"Even the most dull-witted and ignorant person can grasp the fact that individual members of the nobility are not equal in physical and mental abilities any more than are people belonging to the “tax-paying”, “base”, ‘low-born” or “non-privileged” peasant class. But in rights all nobles are equal, just as all the peasants are equal in their lack of rights."
"It means giving all citizens equal opportunities of working on the publicly-owned means of production, on the publicly-owned land, at the publicly-owned factories, and so forth."
Marx absolutely was opposed to equality of outcome, and had a lot of conflict against other leftists on this point. He was against class as a source of inequality, but he recognized that people have unequal capabilities and unequal needs.
I'm not a Marxist, but I actually read a bit of what he wrote - the difference between the words people typically put in his mouth and what he says is gigantic. This is an example. Marxism was a successful ideology over other leftist ideologies is in a huge part because it did recognize that people aren't equal, and that it based it's critique on capitalism on far more than that.
> because everyone's "need" is the same. Maybe adjusted by a few exceptions like family size
And the parts of Marx you quote say literally that exact thing: that people's needs vary only depending on whether they are married, how many children they have "and so on and so forth".
In other words Marx didn't recognize any connection between quantity or quality of work and what you get back. In a Marxist system your income is a function of family size. Indeed Marx didn't even recognize the concept of "work smarter not harder" because he believed everyone's work was exactly the same and the only difference was that big strong men could deliver more units of abstract "labor" per hour than a small weedy sick man.
Why do you think your quotes dispute what I said? Is it not perfect support for it?
It really doesn't do that. He was giving examples of how people's needs changed, to critique people who said that everyone's needs are the same. As I said, this where he disagreed with many leftists, and the name of the text is "Critique of..."
The next quote literally says that some are better or work more and therefore the right to one's work is a right to unequality.
If you want the full context, read the full text. It's not so long. Otherwise, you have to trust me for the context and not imagine one.
You are wrong. Even in Das Capital Marx comments that there are simpler labor and complex labor. You could think in a complex labor producing more value than a simpler one, in exchange of the worker needing more salary for compensating more time needed for its education and fomation. However, this changes almost nothing for the model and main argument presented in Das Capital, therefore, for most part he just simplified the model assuming that all labor was a simple one.
Marxism is incoherent so debating it is largely pointless, but in the quotes above he clearly defines labor as a "standardized unit" which differs only in duration and intensity. This is nonsense so it's not surprising he later tried to walk it back a bit, but as you note, that was half-hearted at best and he usually treated labor as if it were something like coal.
In reality there's already a standardized unit which sums up the worth of a person's labor (money) and a standardized way to compute it (the market). Marx didn't like what that system computed and argued strongly that it all be swept away and replaced with some notion of "need" (family size) and "ability" (simple hours worked or intensity of those hours) which is drastically too simple to reflect reality. That's why his ideas led to collapse everywhere they were tried.
The recruiter who reached out to me, two months ago, said as a disclaimer -- there is a possibility that even if I get an offer the joining might happen only in 8-12 months. Felt bizarre.
I've been writing an email newsletter on backend dev for the past few years - https://quastor.org/
Basically, I look through all the Big Tech engineering blog posts and look for interesting posts. Then I'll write up an article talking about the tech stack and the main takeaways.
I've been learning Adobe Illustrator + After Effects recently and am now starting to add some visualizations + graphics to accompany the articles.
I make more than $500 per month but this is more of a passion project and the income is honestly not competitive (at all) with what I earn as a dev.
It also gives me a way to learn about marketing/growth + monetization. Hard to learn that stuff w/o doing.
There is a difference between Chinese society and western society. Chinese do not allow kids to play video games for too long because they know effects of games on the youth, they also restrict what can be viewed by children on Chinese version of tik tok for the exactly same reason. They restrict freedom of their kids because they believe it's more productive and better for society. In west we do not do that because freedom is important for us. What you need to understand is that there is no free lunch, freedom has a cost that you need to pay, and we are paying for it.
So while the US pacifies its citizens China tried to make foreign solders to send to the US. TikTok being a tool to "slow down" Americans while enabling foreigners. Seems pretty Sus to me.
Please stop telling people they’re uneducated on the topic in response to one comment. You’ve done it multiple times and it’s unnecessarily aggressive. Ask clarifying questions or provide counterfactuals.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
It is quite unnecessary to hear you call everyone you disagree with uneducated or similar.
The user-base on TikTok (in the US at least) leans extremely left (because they're all young) so the news media has idiotically made this a left vs. right issue.
Yes, any neutral observer can see that it's incredibly foolish to let a company with strong connections to our largest geopolitical rival have control over 1-2 hours of attention (every day) of young people in the US.
We literally have no idea if TikTok is boosting certain political/social values amongst American youth. Even a slight nudge could have a huge effects (because of the scale at which TikTok operates) and it would be impossible to detect.
"I feel like with these tools, there’s some backdoor to access user data in almost all of them,” said an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans’ birthdays and phone numbers."
