Videocy/Literacy

[jupiviv]

"The unity of contradictory forces excludes contradiction". Well, does it, jupiviv?

Depends on what you mean by "contradiction". By Marx's definition, all finite things are contradictory forces, and the whole universe is nothing but a unity of such forces. But even without taking it that far, it doesn't make sense. It's impossible for something to have the exact same value for different people, because they are different people. This is a contradiction I suppose, but it can't be eliminated barring the discovery of a way to make identical copies of people.

To be fair (while unfairly interjecting myself again into a conversation: boohoo!) the "something" you mention is a commodity, which is in itself already abstracted inside some large scale commodity market.

Yes, by I "something" meant a commodity. But by "value" I meant overall value rather than just monetary. Even if something has a fixed price in a market, it will never have the exact same value (whatever form of value it may be) for two people in all moments of time. For example, classical music recordings cost more than techno albums, but a classical music fan and a techno fan are likely to value a classical music recording very differently, and completely independently of its price.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Yes, by I "something" meant a commodity. But by "value" I meant overall value rather than just monetary. Even if something has a fixed price in a market, it will never have the exact same value (whatever form of value it may be) for two people in all moments of time. For example, classical music recordings cost more than techno albums, but a classical music fan and a techno fan are likely to value a classical music recording very differently, and completely independently of its price.

Of course we're not talking about pricing here. But music or styles are no commodities and Marx certainly never was talking about exchange value of art. Certainly they have use value. And all these fluctuations would disappear in commodity markets: they are abstracting the product in a way. The fact that these music recordings are based on taste disqualifies them from being commodity since they are "supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market". Are you sure you want do discuss economics with Leyla? Better first read up on it.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

That said, Marx did not critique capitalism from an abstracted mode. This was not future-predictability but concrete actuality. Marx's critique of the dynamics of capitalism is what stands here, in my estimation, irrefutably tall.

Well, yes, but still some generalized and as such abstracted version of capitalism: pure as mode of production and often in terms of social relations. His understanding can often not be disputed here and has influenced a lot of thought on the subject.

I agree there is historical context for Marx in the pathologies of the age; the machine-like coherence of whole world, either spirit or material; the possibility of its historical predictability, its telos, its aim.

Yes, modes of thinking defining men as "producers" of nature, environment and even their own being.

What sort of socio-economic configuration would any of us posit as possible past capitalism? What possible configuration borne out of the exigencies of capital culture worldwide would others imagine? ... You'd have to come up with something better, something 'next' that speaks as broadly the persistency of Marxist framework; the reality of its appearance in praxis, and esp. for me, the acuity of his critique of capitalism. ... If one cannot see past this configuration, one can at least see that others have.

Baudrillard talks about an “end of political economy”:

• The end of labor. The end of production. The end of political economy. The end of the signifier/signified dialectic which facilitates the accumulation of knowledge and of meaning, the linear syntagma of cumulative discourse. And at the same time, the end simultaneously of the exchange value/use value dialectic which is the only thing that makes accumulation and social production possible. The end of linear dimension of discourse. The end of the linear dimension of the commodity. The end of the classical era of the sign. The end of the era of production. (from Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death).

[jupiviv]

But music or styles are no commodities and Marx certainly never was talking about exchange value of art.

OK, let's take a commodity like petrol. Someone might need it to fuel his car to go to and from work, while someone else may need it to transport some stuff from one place to another. The use value is different here, because it is put to different uses. There's no reason to assume that it the two uses are objectively equally valuable just because the same price is paid.

I think the difference between capitalism and communism is that the former thinks the buyer and seller are gods and the latter that the producer/labourer is god. The reason why capitalism has won out is probably because it has more gods on its side! But ultimately, they are systems and therefore neither good nor bad. Their value is itself wholly dependent on how and by whom they are used.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

OK, let's take a commodity like petrol. Someone might need it to fuel his car to go to and from work, while someone else may need it to transport some stuff from one place to another. The use value is different here, because it is put to different uses. There's no reason to assume that it the two uses are objectively equally valuable just because the same price is paid.

Are we talking value or price now? And it should really be crude for a commodity in economics. In any case your example has little to do with any Marx or labour theory of value.

I think the difference between capitalism and communism is that the former thinks the buyer and seller are gods and the latter that the producer/labourer is god.

The magic of the free market versus the magic of the free laborer. Hmmm.

[Leyla Shen]

Pye: That said, Marx did not critique capitalism from an abstracted mode. This was not future-predictability but concrete actuality. Marx's critique of the dynamics of capitalism is what stands here, in my estimation, irrefutably tall.

D: Well, yes, but still some generalized and as such abstracted version of capitalism: pure as mode of production and often in terms of social relations. His understanding can often not be disputed here and has influenced a lot of thought on the subject.

I'm sorry, Diebert, I'm having trouble working out what you're saying here. You mean, there's a particular, concrete version of capitalism that excludes its mode of production and social relations?

[Leyla Shen]

The magic of the free market versus the magic of the free laborer. Hmmm.

Yes—magic! magic! magic!

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Well, yes, but still some generalized and as such abstracted version of capitalism: pure as mode of production and often in terms of social relations.

You mean, there's a particular, concrete version of capitalism that excludes its mode of production and social relations?

Where do you read exclusion? I mean that there are broader frameworks which do not define it like some specific way in which the productive property is owned and controlled with all the related social ordering. Starting with Adam Smith and his "obvious and simple system of natural liberty" although that was still labor centered I think. A broader definition which is at the same time rather concrete in its simplicity would be "economic individualism". There are many system theories attached to that which do not follow Marxist analysis. The abstractions I see in much of the original Marxist theory are the labor forces and social classes which then are used to describe the actuality of economic realities of that period. Also I'm not sure if Marx ever defined capitalism in any succinct form. As if producing theory was his own industry [joke].

[Leyla Shen]

Yes, the LTV is central to Adams and Ricardo, and Marx argued that human labour and not market forces (supply and demand) were at the root of capitalist economics as embodied by the Industrial Revolution and, initially and most predominantly, the exploitation by capitalists (property owners) of the labour of orphaned and other (propertyless) children for profit.

Still goes on in sweat shops and the like. China, the modern industrial centre of the world, is the "new" England.

And the point is, unless you eliminate wage labour (the theory behind the actuality), you necessarily have a functioning LTV and all its socio-economic relations appearing in reality.

[Leyla Shen]

The Children Who Built Victorian Britain

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Yes, the LTV is central to Adams and Ricardo, and Marx argued that human labour and not market forces (supply and demand) were at the root of capitalist economics as embodied by the Industrial Revolution and, initially and most predominantly, the exploitation by capitalists (property owners) of the labour of orphaned and other (propertyless) children for profit.

Still goes on in sweat shops and the like. China, the modern industrial centre of the world, is the "new" England.

So the criticism is against a certain form of capitalism or some abstract aspect of it which still functions in a concrete sense in places where the social context is much like the 19th century in Europe. That should be a clue.

And the point is, unless you eliminate wage labour (the theory behind the actuality), you necessarily have a functioning LTV and all its socio-economic relations appearing in reality

That's the same song in every ideology, eager to point how it's all really there in "reality". Psychoanalysts will do the same with their theories. But having some of its components appear doesn't make it necessarily a useful coherent model for the management of a globalized economy!

All this doesn't address the actual criticism that Jup brought to the table, in his flawed terminology. LTV addresses exchange value and tries to diminish the significance of use value. Or with other words: too much rationality is imposed on the economical actors and forces. That's still the case with the current market economy with its statistical approach, ignoring for example utter randomness and perfect storms. Rational systems might not work without rational people. And rational people, how alienated have they become underneath the veneer of smarts?

[Leyla Shen]

And rational people, how alienated have they become underneath the veneer of smarts?

Tell me about it.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

And rational people, how alienated have they become underneath the veneer of smarts?

Tell me about it.

• D'oh!

[Bobo]

The reason the value can be hold equal is because Marx believed in human labor having some kind of absolute "basic" value, even when only in abstract sense (the "socially necessary abstract labor embodied in a commodity").

People are the commodities.

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.

The right thing in socialism is that just as every person should seek himself, his particular nature, and also strive to find himself, he should also strive to acquire his own property; and here his possibilities must not from the start be restricted from outside.
[in socialism] A man can be proud of acquired riches, and rightly look up to them as to a moral symbol of inner work, too.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

The reason the value can be hold equal is because Marx believed in human labor having some kind of absolute "basic" value, even when only in abstract sense (the "socially necessary abstract labor embodied in a commodity").

People are the commodities.

Marx warns for that development in capitalism but in his theory people are defined as nothing but the totality of "social relations" and labor power as "essential quality" of the human being.

[Leyla Shen]

And you are being paid for doing exactly what you would do if you didn't have to work for it, no?

[Diebert van Rhijn]

And you are being paid for doing exactly what you would do if you didn't have to work for it, no?

Sometimes. But lets face it, "labor power" is just not a very successful philosophical concept. Production is better but only in relation to the real and the self.

[Leyla Shen]

Sometimes.

There you go. That wasn’t too painful, now was it; the reality of socially necessary labour time. The reason you can even say “sometimes” rather than, say, look at me blankly is because of the difference between simple, skilled and compound labour—and to think that we haven’t even touched the question of the relation of capital and the average rate of profit to labour power.

But lets face it, "labor power" is just not a very successful philosophical concept.

Why ever not? It’s perfectly universal, as well as being logically and empirically verifiable.

Perhaps it's just not poetically appealing enough for you, eh darlin'? Too harsh a truth?

[Diebert van Rhijn]

There you go. That wasn’t too painful, now was it; the reality of socially necessary labour time. The reason you can even say “sometimes” rather than, say, look at me blankly is because of the difference between simple, skilled and compound labour—and to think that we haven’t even touched the question of the relation of capital and the average rate of profit to labour power.

I was first trying the blank look as I was not sure what you were asking since it really was a pretty densely constructed question. And you're still not making much sense. Do you mean the work it took to decode your question? Or are you just in the business of producing and selling vagueness (like Marxists so readily do). The ambiguity of a reply like "sometimes" diminishes the value of any abstract like "socially necessary labour time" or labour power.

Better than "totality of social relation": the totality of all relations, to geography, genes, randomness, etc. Social relations have proven to shift faster than any Marxist demarcation of human nature. Example: the 20th century.

Better than "labour power" would be "capacity for transforming anything forward" or I'd prefer "genius", the moving spirit. Same principle, pushing a rock or pushing a thought. They can both go nowhere in which case its value is exactly zero.

But lets face it, "labor power" is just not a very successful philosophical concept.

Why ever not? It’s perfectly universal, as well as being logically and empirically verifiable.

It's neither of these three, that's the problem. But I'm not going to discuss it here again. Perhaps some other time!

[Leyla Shen]

We have vastly different definitions of "vague", you and I.

Perhaps some other time!

I think we both know that's not going to go anywhere!

Particularly when you like to finish things off with the essential "everything is 'illusory', anyhoo". Doesn't get more vague than that.

[Cahoot]

This subject has been of intense, if not consuming interest to myself - especially over the past 5 years of witnessing a quantum change in the manner, quality and form of thinking & communicating capacities with which university students enter their studies these days.

“The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe.”


"Don’t Oppress Me With Your Commas

More crushing injustice on campus, this time at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies:"

http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidt ... ommas.html

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Particularly when you like to finish things off with the essential "everything is 'illusory', anyhoo".

As for illusory -- just saying that it would be better if people would stop making up stuff. The goal is elevation, no matter.

[Bobo]

Better than "labour power" would be "capacity for transforming anything forward" or I'd prefer "genius", the moving spirit.

Marx warns for that development in capitalism but in his theory people are defined as nothing but the totality of "social relations" and labor power as "essential quality" of the human being.

I'm not sure about that, bear with me:

Although I tried to show in an earlier chapter that genius is the factor which primarily elevates man above the animals, and in connection with that fact that it is man alone who has a history (this being explained by the presence in all men of some degree of the quality of genius). I must return to that earlier side of my argument. Genius involves the living actuality of the intelligible subject. History manifests itself only as a social thing, as the " objective spirit," the individuals as such playing no part in it, being, in fact, non-historical. Here we see the threads of our argument converging. If it be the case, and I do not think that I am wrong, that the timeless, human personality is the necessary condition of every real ethical relation to our fellow men, and if individuality is the necessary preliminary to the collective spirit, then it is clear why the "metaphysical animal" and the "political animal," the possessor of genius and the maker of history, are one and the same, are humanity.
And the old controversy is settled ; which comes first, the individual or the community ? Both must be equal and simultaneous.

I think that I have proved at every point that genius is simply the higher morality. The great man is not only the truest to himself, the most unforgetful, the one to whom errors and lies are most hateful and intolerable ; he is also the most social, at the same time the most self-contained, and the most open man. The genius is altogether a higher form, not merely intellectually, but also morally. In his own person, the genius reveals the idea of mankind. He represents what man is ; he is the subject whose object is the whole universe which he makes endure ,for all time.

The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on organic nature; and the more universal man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible – so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity.
Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Let us now see, further, how the concept of estranged, alienated labor must express and present itself in real life.
If the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong?
To a being other than myself.
Who is this being?

The gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal production (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods. However, the gods on their own were never the lords of labor. No more was nature. And what a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labor and the more the miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more man were to renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the product to please these powers.

The alien being, to whom labor and the product of labor belongs, in whose service labor is done and for whose benefit the product of labor is provided, can only be man himself.

[Dennis Mahar]

Chukka chukka chukka
ah a oh oh oh
video killed the radio star
can't go back, can't rewind
ah a oh oh oh

there is no possibility in blaming system, student, equipment.
cry me a river sooky baby.

I got the music
I got the music
I got the music in ME.
geddit?

a salaried performance
as good as it gets.

[Leyla Shen]

As for illusory -- just saying that it would be better if people would stop making up stuff. The goal is elevation, no matter.

Oh? You exclude yourself from the category of "making stuff up"?