PPLE
05-03-2007, 08:10 AM
Population does not grow until it is negated by starvation and food supply does not remain static – quite the opposite, productiveness increases at a faster rate than the growth of population. The “Theory of Population” became a dated reactionary political doctrine until resurrected by the neo-Malthusians of 30 years ago.
But, as was detailed in the Means thread, resurrection does not imply renovation. What was both odious and dubious as Theory of Population becomes incomprehensible as the revised theory of “finite resources”. There is no possible corollary between “energy” and population, even in Malthus’ pernicious framework. It gets sillier still if energy becomes “cheap” energy and still more irrelevant if food is replaced by a “totality of resources”, some one of which has to be “finite”, “sooner or later”.
In truth, Malthusian theory is a marker for a certain type of “ecological consciousness”.
While I am on the whole thrilled to sit at your feet and learn, I still think your comparison/attachment of resources and their currently negative planetary effect that will indeed be followed by their scarcity to the population boogabear, is bullshit.
Perhaps the reason you find the 'resurrection' so inscrutable is because, yeah, there ain't no corollary between 'energy' and population. Malthus ain't part of the equation, not the one that involves me, my fingers, toes, and accumulated, diverse, informal study.
No one ever taught me to expect population disruptions. It was my own 2 + 2 = folks will die math-making. I have enormous confidence in the 2's, far less in the math I do. But the "2's," the facts accumulated in multiple fields over multiple years all -do indeed- point to peak oil and to climate change. At a time when globalization has rendered most of the planet dependent (yet still poor), will peak oil not matter? Will coastal flooding? Maybe not to rich white folks who will be closer to the buying side of salvation, now a retail technology.
It's fine, and important, to get back to basics. And I am reading away. But I cannot simply trash the accumulated knowledge of years and years of following the trends on the planet. I don't claim to be an expert to anyone, and cannot claim to have much of a brain at all when in the company I enjoy here. It is true that I had, before even knowing the term reactionary, pondered the relative ethics of famine, etc. as 'natural' or cause for action. So, sure, it is possible that concern for 'nature' and 'finite resources' can be part of a very reactionary world view. But so can anything, well actually everything. That is a function of the time we live in and the way our consciousness is formed by that time. But it doesn't negate the science.
Having precisely no ideological teachings by anyone in my life on matters of ecology, etc., perhaps I am just the self-interested odd bird who escaped the secret neo-malthusian hippy sect who teaches that we are all going to die and carries the spells and torches of one epoch of philosophy forward to the next.
Rather, I looked at the changes underway, pretty much in my lifetime, in how we live and the spread of how we live and the demand curve of how we live. Then I got to reading some about oil and coal, not a lot but some. Since the time of the USS Liberty attack, much has changed.
A hundred years is a short time, indeed.
I do however count my fingers and toes and think whole shit ton of us will find our end, from wars, displacements, and regional, sudden technological rollback. But that's just my suppositions, all subject to correction as more, and basic, math enters the equation...
So, if there is some direct thread between this Malthusian population to this neo-Malthusian thingy to the concepts of peak oil and climate change, what is it? The part of me that says 'Give a man a hammer, he spends his life looking for a nail' wonders if this is not simply some pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey academe. Pardon me for the high fallutin' jargon.
BTW, in re Hammers - the picture from Basra was Outstanding. From the eyes of Lebanese babes to the strong hands of tha man in Basra, Si, Se Peude!
Capital and Nature
Re: Capital and Nature
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Capital and Nature
anaxarchos
05-03-2007, 01:30 PM
On another point, you reminded me of a piece of industrial urban legend. As you likely know, some sheet metal presses have a safety harness for the operator that is supposed to pull your arms out of the press as it closes. The story goes that some bright industrial engineer in your neck of the woods (the auto industry) got the bright idea that if the harness could pull hands out of the press when it closed, it could just as quickly pull them back in when it opened. Talk about "appendage of the machine", the idea is supposed to have been for a cheaper robot with better hands. I have heard the story maybe half a dozen times, each time embellished in a certain way or with a little dance added to it to pantomime calling for the foreman to be released from the thing, and so on... I have no idea whether there is any truth to it whatever, but... the interesting thing is that nobody ever said "that sounds like bullshit to me". The real moral of the story is that it sounds vaguely plausible.
05-03-2007, 01:30 PM
This is such an important issue that I almost took the bait and started off on it despite the fact that we probably can't begin to do it justice in this context. It puzzles the shit out of me, this "white collar", "middle class" thing. It is clearly not a "class" and the social relations are identical to a factory job (sometimes with worse physical conditions), yet it takes on many of the superficial aspects of a "class" of small proprieters. It clearly isn't unique to America but has been increasingly important here since the Great Depression, despite the fact that it has been destroyed and reconstituted several times. We should probably try to talk about it seriously in the near future.In some ways it is worse. In the plant they weren't trying to control our minds, just our bodies. You might lose an arm in a press, but in the cubicle you can lose much more than that.It is entirely irrelevant and not very accurate. Consider the issue from a global perspective. Is there "less" of a "labor" class? Is there less manufacturing? And ask those who work in each new segment of the economy ten years hence. Are "computer workers" immune from the proletarianization of their miserable craft or safe from "competition" with India or China. What "people" who say this really reveal is an intense parochialism that anchors their perspective in San Jose or Austin, and that, for only a few years...
On another point, you reminded me of a piece of industrial urban legend. As you likely know, some sheet metal presses have a safety harness for the operator that is supposed to pull your arms out of the press as it closes. The story goes that some bright industrial engineer in your neck of the woods (the auto industry) got the bright idea that if the harness could pull hands out of the press when it closed, it could just as quickly pull them back in when it opened. Talk about "appendage of the machine", the idea is supposed to have been for a cheaper robot with better hands. I have heard the story maybe half a dozen times, each time embellished in a certain way or with a little dance added to it to pantomime calling for the foreman to be released from the thing, and so on... I have no idea whether there is any truth to it whatever, but... the interesting thing is that nobody ever said "that sounds like bullshit to me". The real moral of the story is that it sounds vaguely plausible.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Capital and Nature
anaxarchos
05-03-2007, 03:35 PM
On the other issue, its a good story. I was young, working a job, and working in the union and on a radical newspaper at night. We were all very "sophisticated" in the style that one might be at that age and the issue of "political education" (about which we knew little) came up in our loose little "collective" (we didn't think of it in those terms at the time). A guy who worked on the paper read a factoid that the Communist Manifesto was the second most read tract in human history after the Bible (despite the fact that it didn't do nearly as much to purge your accumulated sins). He got it stuck in his head that between the job, the union, social life, and the paper, we knew an awful lot of people and all we needed to do was to gather up a few folks and read the legendary tract outloud. We all thought it was a terrible idea (sorry to say). A few very good CP guys we knew explained patiently that they had tried to do the same by putting together a few people to read the Daily Worker once a week and that it was a disaster (having tried to read the Daily Worker, I can understand why).
The guy who was fixated, though, refused to give up. He kept on about it until we actually tried it. It was a little awkward at first but we got the method down pretty quickly. Everybody had to read, even if for a short bit, and everyone else had to help those who had a hard time (the number of people who have trouble reading out loud is astonishing). The group couldn't be too small or too large and we had to get agreement up front that everyone could interrupt and was encouraged to, as often as they wanted, but they had to stick to what the old man was saying (no speeches and no ranging far afield). Also, no specific partisanship or political debates were allowed. We had to essentially let the old man talk for about the first 50 pages or so with only questions like, "what does this mean?", or "Is this the same as ...?", or "I've got a story like that..."... Just basics.
It caught on like a wildfire. Maybe it was the times or maybe because everybody was so visible and active that it made the invites easier. As a sidebar, nothing else really worked as well as the Manifesto which was self contained. I actually used Bees in a couple of my groups and it worked pretty well but not like the old man. It was one of the best things I have ever done.
Maybe, I'm naive but it seems easily repeatable to me (despite the intervening decades). Buy or print off 10 copies of the Manifesto, invite a half dozen or dozen of your friends, meet once or twice a week at the same place and start reading. Marx does the heavy lifting.
BTW, I still correspond with a sizable number of people that I met through this medium, an eon ago.
05-03-2007, 03:35 PM
Why Mr. Wolf, that's the nicest thing someone has said about something I wrote in a long time. Guess I'll have to dust myself off and try to live up to such high praise...Anaxarchos wrote (emphasis added):
That is not good enough for Burkett. He would like to turn Marx’s contradiction between capital and labor into a fundamental contradiction between capital and labor or nature. The intent is the same as with all “eco-socialists”: to make the struggle between capital and nature independent of class struggle, and even to give it primacy over such struggle. Just as in the discussion of Darwin and Malthus above, the intent is also to appropriate the slogans and authority of Marxism without paying much attention to its content.
I think from now on I'm going to spend a lot more time listening and a lot less time holding forth.
On the other issue, its a good story. I was young, working a job, and working in the union and on a radical newspaper at night. We were all very "sophisticated" in the style that one might be at that age and the issue of "political education" (about which we knew little) came up in our loose little "collective" (we didn't think of it in those terms at the time). A guy who worked on the paper read a factoid that the Communist Manifesto was the second most read tract in human history after the Bible (despite the fact that it didn't do nearly as much to purge your accumulated sins). He got it stuck in his head that between the job, the union, social life, and the paper, we knew an awful lot of people and all we needed to do was to gather up a few folks and read the legendary tract outloud. We all thought it was a terrible idea (sorry to say). A few very good CP guys we knew explained patiently that they had tried to do the same by putting together a few people to read the Daily Worker once a week and that it was a disaster (having tried to read the Daily Worker, I can understand why).
The guy who was fixated, though, refused to give up. He kept on about it until we actually tried it. It was a little awkward at first but we got the method down pretty quickly. Everybody had to read, even if for a short bit, and everyone else had to help those who had a hard time (the number of people who have trouble reading out loud is astonishing). The group couldn't be too small or too large and we had to get agreement up front that everyone could interrupt and was encouraged to, as often as they wanted, but they had to stick to what the old man was saying (no speeches and no ranging far afield). Also, no specific partisanship or political debates were allowed. We had to essentially let the old man talk for about the first 50 pages or so with only questions like, "what does this mean?", or "Is this the same as ...?", or "I've got a story like that..."... Just basics.
It caught on like a wildfire. Maybe it was the times or maybe because everybody was so visible and active that it made the invites easier. As a sidebar, nothing else really worked as well as the Manifesto which was self contained. I actually used Bees in a couple of my groups and it worked pretty well but not like the old man. It was one of the best things I have ever done.
Maybe, I'm naive but it seems easily repeatable to me (despite the intervening decades). Buy or print off 10 copies of the Manifesto, invite a half dozen or dozen of your friends, meet once or twice a week at the same place and start reading. Marx does the heavy lifting.
BTW, I still correspond with a sizable number of people that I met through this medium, an eon ago.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Capital and Nature
Two Americas
05-03-2007, 04:07 PM
This is such an important issue.. We should probably try to talk about it seriously in the near future.
Yes.
On another point, you reminded me of a piece of industrial urban legend. As you likely know, some sheet metal presses have a safety harness for the operator that is supposed to pull your arms out of the press as it closes. The story goes that some bright industrial engineer in your neck of the woods (the auto industry) got the bright idea that if the harness could pull hands out of the press when it closed, it could just as quickly pull them back in when it opened. Talk about "appendage of the machine", the idea is supposed to have been for a cheaper robot with better hands. I have heard the story maybe half a dozen times, each time embellished in a certain way or with a little dance added to it to pantomime calling for the foreman to be released from the thing, and so on... I have no idea whether there is any truth to it whatever, but... the interesting thing is that nobody ever said "that sounds like bullshit to me". The real moral of the story is that it sounds vaguely plausible.
That kicked around in Detroit for years. I don't know if it is true or not.
05-03-2007, 04:07 PM
This is such an important issue.. We should probably try to talk about it seriously in the near future.
Yes.
On another point, you reminded me of a piece of industrial urban legend. As you likely know, some sheet metal presses have a safety harness for the operator that is supposed to pull your arms out of the press as it closes. The story goes that some bright industrial engineer in your neck of the woods (the auto industry) got the bright idea that if the harness could pull hands out of the press when it closed, it could just as quickly pull them back in when it opened. Talk about "appendage of the machine", the idea is supposed to have been for a cheaper robot with better hands. I have heard the story maybe half a dozen times, each time embellished in a certain way or with a little dance added to it to pantomime calling for the foreman to be released from the thing, and so on... I have no idea whether there is any truth to it whatever, but... the interesting thing is that nobody ever said "that sounds like bullshit to me". The real moral of the story is that it sounds vaguely plausible.
That kicked around in Detroit for years. I don't know if it is true or not.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Capital and Nature
anaxarchos
05-03-2007, 05:17 PM
Crisis is real and in the history of capitalism, there is nothing but a continuous sequence of plagues, famines, genocides, and the elimination of populations here, with their recreation there. The problem comes in with fetishism which Burkett is right about but which extends 1000 times further than he guesses.
In our society, social relationships between people are expressed as material relations between things. You have no connection to people in China and yet a hundred people are set in motion there because you wanted a new pair of sneakers. You pays your money and gets your shoes. It is the shoes that carry the attributes. They have a price, they are on sale, they are contributing to the trade deficits. Profits "rise", plants "close", emissions "increase", markets "panic", industries "move", capital "accumulates", cities "grow"... gimme a break. Meanwhile people sit and watch a dance of inanimate objects in which their only connection is to material things. They earn "money" and they spend "money", that is, if they are not subject to unemployment (and I guess if they die, they are subject to unalivement). We have an evolved social intercourse, a giant beehive, that encompasses 6 billion people, where no one person can get a facial tick without it rippling through a million others, and yet everybody swears that they are isolated, alone, and not "connected". It is a side-effect of "alienation". It is "dead labor", congealed as Capital, that actually appears to be in motion, while living labor counts for nothing. Everything stands on its head. What would be obvious to a Martian, or to a Huron, or to an Athenian, even with his 32 slaves, is absolutely indecipherable to us.
In such circumstances, don't talk to me about the "conflict between humans or nature", the finity of physical resources, "natural balance", or the "disease of industry" without being prepared to talk about why it is not just the fetishes talking. Worse, once phrased in these terms, explain to me how the ideology of the enemy is to be segregated. That is the significance of "Malthusianism". How can a theory designed to watch the poor starve (of course, it is the poor that passively "starve" and are not actively "starved" by somebody) in Ireland, without intervention or concern, also be a theoretical proposition that "has merit" in "the realm of energy"? So too, for every other theory of "spirit", or "mistake of civilization", or of people "deciding" on the "wrong path", and so on...
The problem is not whether "we" do or don't "run out of oil", but whether we have a logical basis for even talking about it. The danger is in precisely what Bookchin wrote which is entirely self-evident and which I completely agree with even if don't agree with much else that he said.
BTW, I am also enjoying the conversation and...
No hammer would ever have been created if nails did not already exist
05-03-2007, 05:17 PM
Look PPLE, I'll make a deal with you: you stop sitting on my feet (which will creep me out in short order, anyway) and I will back off on the anti-eco-shit. I'm of two minds on it anyway.I do however count my fingers and toes and think whole shit ton of us will find our end, from wars, displacements, and regional, sudden technological rollback. But that's just my suppositions, all subject to correction as more, and basic, math enters the equation...
So, if there is some direct thread between this Malthusian population to this neo-Malthusian thingy to the concepts of peak oil and climate change, what is it? The part of me that says 'Give a man a hammer, he spends his life looking for a nail' wonders if this is not simply some pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey academe. Pardon me for the high fallutin' jargon.
BTW, in re Hammers - the picture from Basra was Outstanding. From the eyes of Lebanese babes to the strong hands of tha man in Basra, Si, Se Peude!
Crisis is real and in the history of capitalism, there is nothing but a continuous sequence of plagues, famines, genocides, and the elimination of populations here, with their recreation there. The problem comes in with fetishism which Burkett is right about but which extends 1000 times further than he guesses.
In our society, social relationships between people are expressed as material relations between things. You have no connection to people in China and yet a hundred people are set in motion there because you wanted a new pair of sneakers. You pays your money and gets your shoes. It is the shoes that carry the attributes. They have a price, they are on sale, they are contributing to the trade deficits. Profits "rise", plants "close", emissions "increase", markets "panic", industries "move", capital "accumulates", cities "grow"... gimme a break. Meanwhile people sit and watch a dance of inanimate objects in which their only connection is to material things. They earn "money" and they spend "money", that is, if they are not subject to unemployment (and I guess if they die, they are subject to unalivement). We have an evolved social intercourse, a giant beehive, that encompasses 6 billion people, where no one person can get a facial tick without it rippling through a million others, and yet everybody swears that they are isolated, alone, and not "connected". It is a side-effect of "alienation". It is "dead labor", congealed as Capital, that actually appears to be in motion, while living labor counts for nothing. Everything stands on its head. What would be obvious to a Martian, or to a Huron, or to an Athenian, even with his 32 slaves, is absolutely indecipherable to us.
In such circumstances, don't talk to me about the "conflict between humans or nature", the finity of physical resources, "natural balance", or the "disease of industry" without being prepared to talk about why it is not just the fetishes talking. Worse, once phrased in these terms, explain to me how the ideology of the enemy is to be segregated. That is the significance of "Malthusianism". How can a theory designed to watch the poor starve (of course, it is the poor that passively "starve" and are not actively "starved" by somebody) in Ireland, without intervention or concern, also be a theoretical proposition that "has merit" in "the realm of energy"? So too, for every other theory of "spirit", or "mistake of civilization", or of people "deciding" on the "wrong path", and so on...
The problem is not whether "we" do or don't "run out of oil", but whether we have a logical basis for even talking about it. The danger is in precisely what Bookchin wrote which is entirely self-evident and which I completely agree with even if don't agree with much else that he said.
BTW, I am also enjoying the conversation and...
No hammer would ever have been created if nails did not already exist
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Capital and Nature
PPLE
05-03-2007, 05:48 PM
Well sir, that sounds all cool and everything, 'ceptin that tha hammer came first by a long shot...
05-03-2007, 05:48 PM
No hammer would ever have been created if nails did not already exist
Well sir, that sounds all cool and everything, 'ceptin that tha hammer came first by a long shot...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Capital and Nature
anaxarchos
05-03-2007, 06:00 PM
"Claw" Hammer...
or do I gotta claim that this is a "nail":
05-03-2007, 06:00 PM
Semantics... You got what I said.No hammer would ever have been created if nails did not already exist
Well sir, that sounds all cool and everything, 'ceptin that tha hammer came first by a long shot...
"Claw" Hammer...
or do I gotta claim that this is a "nail":
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Capital and Nature
PPLE
05-03-2007, 08:29 PM
Naw, you simply hafta claim that whatever that pointyassshit hit was a nail...
05-03-2007, 08:29 PM
.Semantics... You got what I said.No hammer would ever have been created if nails did not already exist
Well sir, that sounds all cool and everything, 'ceptin that tha hammer came first by a long shot...
"Claw" Hammer...
http://z.about.com/d/homerepair/1/0/s/-/-/-/hammer.jpg
or do I gotta claim that this is a "nail":
http://www.thefurtrapper.com/images/Doran%20Knife.jpg
Naw, you simply hafta claim that whatever that pointyassshit hit was a nail...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Capital and Nature
anaxarchos
05-04-2007, 10:54 AM
The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development.[27] And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.
Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities
This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.
As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a twofold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others. The equalisation of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz. expenditure of human labour power or human labour in the abstract. The twofold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products of labour. have one common quality, viz., that of having value.
Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning. Consequently it was the analysis of the prices of commodities that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and it was the common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their characters as values. It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.
The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.
What follows from this is that all thinking that proceeds directly (and sometimes indirectly) from a peculiar social form that expresses social relations as material relations, also has a tendency to present itself as similarly inverted and veiled relations (i.e. "humans vs nature") which, taking one simple step backward, reveal themselves as phenomena which cannot possibly be true as presented. In fact, these too, are the expression of the underlying social relations ("human versus human"), no matter what "it looks like to me".
PPLE, this is quite a perspective, above.
What... Do... You... Think...?
(For KOBH, the above is as good a practical use of Hegel's phenomena, i.e. the shadows on the cave wall, as I have seen)
05-04-2007, 10:54 AM
Well, if you are done sparring with me about stone axes, read this discussion of "fetishism" by Marx (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 1, Section 4:The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof):Naw, you simply hafta claim that whatever that pointyassshit hit was a nail...
The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development.[27] And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.
Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities
This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.
As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a twofold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others. The equalisation of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz. expenditure of human labour power or human labour in the abstract. The twofold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products of labour. have one common quality, viz., that of having value.
Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning. Consequently it was the analysis of the prices of commodities that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and it was the common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their characters as values. It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.
The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.
What follows from this is that all thinking that proceeds directly (and sometimes indirectly) from a peculiar social form that expresses social relations as material relations, also has a tendency to present itself as similarly inverted and veiled relations (i.e. "humans vs nature") which, taking one simple step backward, reveal themselves as phenomena which cannot possibly be true as presented. In fact, these too, are the expression of the underlying social relations ("human versus human"), no matter what "it looks like to me".
PPLE, this is quite a perspective, above.
What... Do... You... Think...?
(For KOBH, the above is as good a practical use of Hegel's phenomena, i.e. the shadows on the cave wall, as I have seen)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Capital and Nature
Kid of the Black Hole
05-04-2007, 09:28 PM
Hey I remember reading through the Bookchin essay you linked to like a month ago and thought I should mention it since anybody reading this post might be confused about your Bookchin comment. Weird name - I thought it was Boochkin at first which is vaguely Russian sounding.
I guess this ties right into the fetishism of commodities quotes you put up from Capital in the post downthread.
In a blurb about this it says:
In Capital, this argument is presented by tracing the formal aspect of a commodity, its value, from the most abstract model possible towards more concrete, real life models. This method of analysis owes much to Hegel, is densely written, and proves highly resistant to summarization.
Can you elaborate on this at all? I see the obvious Hegel "fingerprints" here, but I'm not sure I exactly the process. Sort of like how you can "understand" how to solve a math problem as the teacher works it on the blackboard..
EDIT: a link to an earlier post
http://www.populistindependent.org/phpb ... kchin#2072 (http://www.populistindependent.org/phpb ... kchin#2072)
05-04-2007, 09:28 PM
.Look PPLE, I'll make a deal with you: you stop sitting on my feet (which will creep me out in short order, anyway) and I will back off on the anti-eco-shit. I'm of two minds on it anyway.I do however count my fingers and toes and think whole shit ton of us will find our end, from wars, displacements, and regional, sudden technological rollback. But that's just my suppositions, all subject to correction as more, and basic, math enters the equation...
So, if there is some direct thread between this Malthusian population to this neo-Malthusian thingy to the concepts of peak oil and climate change, what is it? The part of me that says 'Give a man a hammer, he spends his life looking for a nail' wonders if this is not simply some pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey academe. Pardon me for the high fallutin' jargon.
BTW, in re Hammers - the picture from Basra was Outstanding. From the eyes of Lebanese babes to the strong hands of tha man in Basra, Si, Se Peude!
Crisis is real and in the history of capitalism, there is nothing but a continuous sequence of plagues, famines, genocides, and the elimination of populations here, with their recreation there. The problem comes in with fetishism which Burkett is right about but which extends 1000 times further than he guesses.
In our society, social relationships between people are expressed as material relations between things. You have no connection to people in China and yet a hundred people are set in motion there because you wanted a new pair of sneakers. You pays your money and gets your shoes. It is the shoes that carry the attributes. They have a price, they are on sale, they are contributing to the trade deficits. Profits "rise", plants "close", emissions "increase", markets "panic", industries "move", capital "accumulates", cities "grow"... gimme a break. Meanwhile people sit and watch a dance of inanimate objects in which their only connection is to material things. They earn "money" and they spend "money", that is, if they are not subject to unemployment (and I guess if they die, they are subject to unalivement). We have an evolved social intercourse, a giant beehive, that encompasses 6 billion people, where no one person can get a facial tick without it rippling through a million others, and yet everybody swears that they are isolated, alone, and not "connected". It is a side-effect of "alienation". It is "dead labor", congealed as Capital, that actually appears to be in motion, while living labor counts for nothing. Everything stands on its head. What would be obvious to a Martian, or to a Huron, or to an Athenian, even with his 32 slaves, is absolutely indiscipherable to us.
In such circumstances, don't talk to me about the "conflict between humans or nature", the finity of physical resources, "natural balance", or the "disease of industry" without being prepared to talk about why it is not just the fetishes talking. Worse, once phrased in these terms, explain to me how the ideology of the enemy is to be segregated. That is the significance of "Malthusianism". How can a theory designed to watch the poor starve (of course, it is the poor that passively "starve" and are not actively "starved" by somebody) in Ireland, without intervention or concern, also be a theoretical proposition that "has merit" in "the realm of energy"? So too, for every other theory of "spirit", or "mistake of civilization", or of people "deciding" on the "wrong path", and so on...
The problem is not whether "we" do or don't "run out of oil", but whether we have a logical basis for even talking about it. The danger is in precisely what Bookchin wrote which is entirely self-evident and which I completely agree with even if don't agree with much else that he said.
BTW, I am also enjoying the conversation and...
No hammer would ever have been created if nails did not already exist
Hey I remember reading through the Bookchin essay you linked to like a month ago and thought I should mention it since anybody reading this post might be confused about your Bookchin comment. Weird name - I thought it was Boochkin at first which is vaguely Russian sounding.
I guess this ties right into the fetishism of commodities quotes you put up from Capital in the post downthread.
In a blurb about this it says:
In Capital, this argument is presented by tracing the formal aspect of a commodity, its value, from the most abstract model possible towards more concrete, real life models. This method of analysis owes much to Hegel, is densely written, and proves highly resistant to summarization.
Can you elaborate on this at all? I see the obvious Hegel "fingerprints" here, but I'm not sure I exactly the process. Sort of like how you can "understand" how to solve a math problem as the teacher works it on the blackboard..
EDIT: a link to an earlier post
http://www.populistindependent.org/phpb ... kchin#2072 (http://www.populistindependent.org/phpb ... kchin#2072)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."