Chavista Club World • Page 15

me. slack or dm?

 

I'll be in!

 

fuck slack
I'm not making new accounts

 

Actually, that's not true. Carter deregulated banks and transportation industries, for example. He, too, wanted welfare reform.

 

Lmfao

 

me please let's get some Caribbean blood in there

 

If jose is in I am in

 

stop copying me nerd

 

Shut up jose

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/why-the-rich-dont-give/309254

 

You getting into Mao more recently? For some reason I thought I remembered you leaning ML and eschewing the other M. Started reading him after reading through his chapters in this Marxism-Leninism-Maoism Basic Course where this passage stuck out to me:

I'm working my way through On Practice and On Contradiction now and seriously wish I could read them in their native language because I think both he and the translator of the versions I've been reading were amazing writers.

Selected Works of Mao Zedong

I know philosophy's importance is debated by hardcore Marxists, but I'm starting to really buy into the way Mao writes about and applies it. And...I'm admittedly biased because I fell in love with Adorno's writings on aesthetics in school, but come on; that passage reads like Lenin after bowl number two. How can you not love it?

 

I'm currently reading An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital by Michael Heinrich (yep, I'm a beginner) and I'm struggling to understand what is meant here:

How is commodity production a "social relationship"? What is meant by "quasi-natural"? How exactly is it that "it appears as if things have the properties and autonomy of subjects"?

 

This will help. Labor theory of value - Wikipedia

In various forms, all three of your questions are addressed by equating the value of a produced commodity with the labour involved in its production.

Commodity production can be understood in a few different ways that may fall under the umbrella of "social" descriptors. In this case I think the vast majority of Marxists would point towards the relationship between the labour of production and product that is the commodity.

By "quasi-natural" I think he means the innate essence of a produced commodity bears a relationship to its social existence via labour and its ability to be exchanged without implicit or set bias, but that this is not immediately noticeable by rote examination of the commodity's physical nature or implicit value to society. i.e. we all need to eat, but a loaf of bread better serves society as a function of the labour involved in both the production of its ingredients and its subsequent production than a commodity to be traded by virtue of its relative value to a prospective recipient because that value isn't only dependent upon a common need of the people, but by proxy can be exploited to serve the want of the recipient in detriment to the people.

Regarding the "things" and their "autonomy" as "subjects" I think the inflection posed by the writing is mostly sarcastic as the commodity retains no value or 'autonomy' independent from the labour involved in its production. That is to say it is dependent upon both the labour of its production and exchange.

edit: All this, of course is to be understood within the context of a communal political state.

 

Thank you for your response, it's much appreciated! So my understanding is that a loaf of bread doesn't inherently have an "exchange value", it's only when it is exchanged that it has an exchange value and becomes a commodity. The exchange value of a commodity is an objectification of the socially necessary labor time required to produce it. Have I understood that correctly?

Also, can you expand a bit on what you mean by "a loaf of bread better serves society as a function of the labour involved in both the production of its ingredients and its subsequent production"? Apologies if I'm being dense here.

Edit: I think I may be conflating exchange value and value (without qualification)

 

There's a couple different levels and directions of abstraction that interpreting Marx can take and I am by no means an expert on any of them so hopefully someone else can jump in and offer more, but building on my understanding I think the emphasis is less on the value of any particular produced commodity as it is on the relationship between the value of the labour consumed by the production of the commodity and the commodity's necessary role in the survival of the workers. So while an inherent "exchange value" seems to have meaning within a capitalist framework, really the only inherent "value" of any commodity is inexorably tied to the labour consumed by its production which is in its relationship with the worker furthermore best understood as a social value.

You're not being dense. Precision of language is important and I am not the best at it. What I meant was to take an engineering diagram of a given commodity and explode it to its base components with a recursive acknowledgement of the labour involved in the production of each rudimentary component. So for example with our loaf of bread, the labour of the farmer that produced the wheat for the flour, the miller that ground the wheat into flour, the worker who maintains the hydro/pneumatic turbine that the miller uses to grind the wheat, the farmer who keeps the cows who produce the manure that enriches the soil for the wheat to grow, etc. There's a cyclical symbiosis of labour and production that escapes a surplus-driven system.

 

Happy May Day

 

I haven't undertaken the project, but I've been told that David Harvey's reading series of Kapital is a very good companion piece.

Reading Marx's Capital Vol I with David Harvey - YouTube

 

Think of it like this: at a certain point, we enter into relationships with one another to reproduce ourselves, then slowly but surely building a world around ourselves that corresponds to the way in which we produce ourselves, e.g., legal protections for private property, the division between owners and laborers and so on. In this way, commodity production is the basis on which our particular period exists; it is how we produce ourselves, alongside one another, divide labor, both in the workplace and along gender lines and so on and so on. It is, in other words, the expression of a particular way human relationships have developed in a particular epoch, with particular interests and necessities. By quasi-natural, he means, we do not question this. We our brought into the ideology through socialization that teaches us that the world in which we live is natural, e.g., if you do not work you starve. So, for example, think of how we approach automation. We blame the robots for putting people out of jobs, for wealth inequality and so forth. This seems to make sense within the ideology of capitalism. But, it isn't the machines that are causing the problem, but the way in which our social system is organized, whereby your boss benefits by replacing you with a machine, so he can get more profit. This is what he means when he says the state of affairs seem to be natural and that it seems as though we are world ruled by things that have their own autonomy; so long as we understand the world from the perspective of capital, we do not see how poverty, environmental decimation, sexism, racism are built into the system operating at maximum potential; rather, we see these phenomena as something that happens because that's just the way things are, or that's the way the market works

 

Thanks for your responses, it's all making more sense now.

 

Christ, shoot me now

 

I thought that dialectics is an ontology which would make it a metaphysic?