Marx

his often obtuse syntax, that experts still struggle with, doesn't seem aimed at the joe six-packs of the 19th century

the condescension is worse in the much more privileged engels. for instance

"Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm

i've known lots of people who don't suffer from 'false consciousness' as engels would understand it so much as a playful nihilistic fatalism about the possibility of change for the better resulting from growing up broke or worse

. . .

medicare / social security for all!

False consciousness in marxist theory isnt just somethinf the working class suffer from that engels, for instance, would say he had broken free from.

It’s not really condescending. The theory is we think according to the terms provided by our age which prevents us from being able to see other ways things could be. They turn to the dialectic because they don’t believe the theorist can simply step “outside” their circumstances and understand things from a god’s-eye view. Insight comes from struggle, from working through the “contradictions” of the age as part of a shared project. It’s the opposite of codescending.

The pre-marxist socialists were more elitist—designing utopias. Marx and Engels brought socialism back to earth by centering it in the class struggle.

yes! definitely! but i would add that sometimes when marxists discuss 'false consciousness' they fail to grasp how much delight fatalistic poor people take in 1) kayfabe antics of crude brazen assholes like trump and 2) playing dumb themselves in the face of seemingly comfortable lefties perplexed by what they (the poor people) experience as a pantomime of false consciousness (perhaps their only sustained act of creativity!) in a world that has been materially crueler to them than it has to many do-gooders. this is not a dismissal of marx or engels! this is monday morning hungover QBing two transcendent philosophers

I don't really see "owning the libs" type shit as being a significantly different formulation from any other "false consciousness"

As we all know, it was only poor people who voted for Trump.

tbf this kind of thing has been extensively thrashed out in adorno vs. kracauer/benjamin and the rich literature following them, all of which depends on having marx as (one) starting point, so we might not really be able to talk about it without marx. but i still think the point stands that the "manifesto" and "capital" are two different works, and if you gripe about the convoluted academic prose in the one that's aimed at a convoluted academic conversation, as evidence that he couldn't relate to the working class, i feel like that needs to be supplemented in the ways that have been asked for upthread: which specific points in the theory would be different if he did not have as much privilege (however much it was)? why?

the language is also convoluted because it's translated from german, of course, but it's fair to say that when he wanted to write in a different register he could. i've been reading marshal berman's /all that is solid melts into air/ and he's otm about the lyricism and rhetorical force of the manifesto, which now sounds like MLK to my ears.

not sure we really need another "soviet union C/D?" discussion but i will go ahead and call any regime that kills tens of millions of people a failure, versus the admittedly external, a priori standard of "murder is bad." that applies whether its initial stated goal is "we will create a socialist utopia" or "we will kill tens of millions of people." we can argue about the causality of that failure as much as any other ("did the electric car fail because of conspiring powerful interests or because the technology wasn't there?") but surely it was a failure. not sure that has much bearing on marx though since the history of the 20th century suggests a range of other common denominators for mass murder at this scale, of which the development of totalitarian bureaucratic states looms largest.

good points Doc

what I meant is that ideas about fx the dictatorship of the proletariat seem free flying fantasy compared to Marx' economic analysis

a relevant point about the style and prose of Capital is that it's actually relatively accessible, despite clearly written for an academic audience. he throws in lots of little witticisms and jokes, some of which i had to read a footnote to understand because they were inside-19th-century-philosopher-jokes, but still. generally it is difficult to read because of the ideas it contains (and the concepts that require defining, at least for me) rather than the way in which he wrote it, and that comes through even via translation.

thesis 11: marx/engels are the lennon/mccartney to hegel's elvis. sober or otherwise i prefer the hits to their deep cuts

class conflict as historical model showing a lot fewer cracks these days than, say, newtonian mechanics

― difficult listening hour, Monday, September 17, 2018 4:09 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a weird thing to say. newtonian mechanics is as essential as quantum or relativistic mechanics. they apply under different conditions.

This was in the lobby of a chain hotel I stayed in

https://i.imgur.com/Ptoj1XC.jpg

The internet has done so much damage we can never know or measure.

so just coming from watching the first episode of the norm macdonald has a show show and i couldn't help but notice david letterman is looking more like a malnourished karl marx

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the question. If you're asking whether he accounts for the fact that machines increase productivity and enable the same person working for the same number of hours to produce more goods, yes, of course he does. But I doubt that he would frame it as "labor-saving."

― Fedora Dostoyevsky (man alive), Saturday, September 15, 2018 9:26 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

labor-saving is like, it used to take 3 capital and 3 labor to produce one unit of output, but with new technology it takes 2 machines and 1 hour of work. both became more productive but labor has a smaller relative increase in marginal productivity along constant factor shares. so in the long-run, output relies on a tiny sliver of labour relative to capital, and the wage rate relative to the return on capital goes to zero. there's parts of marx where he sounds very labor-saving. for example, from wage labor and capital:

But we have already seen that, with every advance in the use of machinery, the constant component of capital, that part which consists of machinery, raw material, etc., increases, while the variable component, the part laid out in labour-power, decreases.

tbc, i asked because you said

one thing that strikes me a lot now is how bad a lot of the common criticisms of Marx's theories are, like I'll see one tossed off by some purported economist or political scientist and I'll think, "Um, no, he addresses that a few chapters into Vol 1."

and 'marx thought technology was labor-saving' is a common criticism of marx often tossed off by purported economists :)

Quite a few Capital reading groups springing up lol

Time for quarantine Capital reading groups.https://t.co/M9XTfhol3n

— Prada-Meinhof (@Prada_Meinhof) April 8, 2020

Grimes in Los Angeles today.

Photography by Jvshvisions pic.twitter.com/b2kemGSYhU

— GRIMES CHARTS (@GrimezszCharts) October 2, 2021

some cool ideas in the communist manifesto but i’m more into crypto gaming UBI pic.twitter.com/u0BdNH4tmV

— james hennessy (@jrhennessy) October 3, 2021

thats right

Wasn't gamer UBI the plot to one of the first Black Mirror episodes

Marx: Vampire capitalism “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire like lives only by sucking living labor”

Economics research: “After a plasma center opens nearby, demand for payday loans falls by over 13% among young borrowers.” https://t.co/qO0gr620fM

— Albert Pinto (@70sBachchan) August 20, 2024

Damn, we're getting ripped off. My wife gives it for free!

I could never be a blood donor, too squeamish

I thought about doing a single bone marrow donation so I can say I did my part, but I'm not sure how that works... I have no idea what my blood type is, tbh

Ironically, the payday loan business itself is a 10x better illustration of that quote than the plasma bank.

in the current LRB adam tooze writes

If we are to achieve an energy transition, it will not follow a familiar timetable. It must mark a fundamental break with an otherwise irresistible logic of accumulation. It doesn’t require unanimity or consensus. It doesn’t require that no one is left behind. What it does require is a powerful coalition to impose its will, to make history in the most radical sense. It is hard not to be reminded of the contrast drawn by Marx between, on the one hand, our existing state of ‘prehistory’, in which we live in a confused turmoil, buffeted by contradictory social forces that we glimpse only through the distorting lens of ideology, and, on the other, the promise of an era of autonomous history-making to come, in which humanity will direct its destiny. As Fressoz describes it, a true energy transition would require nothing less.

What it does require is a powerful coalition to impose its will, to make history in the most radical sense.

There is nothing new about a small group with control over the necessary resources using its power to impose their will on a society - and imposing their will on its neighbors, too. What would be exceptional would be if this were done for any motive other than a desire to increase that group's wealth and power over society.

xp I couldn't find any passages by Marx himself that spell out that view of "autonomous history-making" quite so explicitly, but passages by Engels are fairly easy to find:

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man's own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history, pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

- Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

hell yes that’s the stuff

The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature

Reads like a bad parody of 19th century triumphalism.

In other news https://www.instagram.com/p/DFFn5F1svj5/?igsh=MWM1Z3ozMXhwcW9tcw==

If we are to achieve an energy transition, it will not follow a familiar timetable. It must mark a fundamental break with an otherwise irresistible logic of accumulation

95% of electricity produced in france is from sources that don’t emit carbon. they didn’t fundamentally break with the logic of accumulation (whatever that means..) they just didn’t have a big anti-nuclear movement so they still have reactors providing 75% and so a modest increase in solar and wind got them close to 100%

i feel like all of history is crises happening and humanity just muddling through shittily. the fantasy that what we need is to all snap out of it and act decisively to seize our destiny seems naive

That reading has its own naivities too.

france was able to achieve that by, like much/all of the west, simply offshoring the production of much of its material needs. it’s not just electricity production that requires oil, coal and gas. i read somewhere lately that china has produced more concrete and steel construction in the last 20 years than all other countries in history combined.

anyway the whole piece is here - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/adam-tooze/trouble-transitioning

i can understand being uneasy around engels’ talk of humans having “dominion” over the earth but i read it more as the goal being humans having dominion over themselves. we all agree that the public school system needs help but none of us seem to be able to do anything about it. wars break out, there is a climate emergency, and even the most powerful people on earth seem to only dimly or partially grasp at the outlines to solutions. when we will start acting like grown ups?

when will we realise that we are all brothers and sisters?

france was able to achieve that by, like much/all of the west, simply offshoring the production of much of its material needs

that's actually not true. consumption-based emissions (which account for carbon emitted in imports) in france declined from 9t tons to about 6t tons in 2022, larger than the reduction in territorial inputs (https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2). consumption-based emissions are larger in absolute terms than territorial emissions, but the gap has been flat or shrinking, not widening, over the last 20 years

(however, in my previous post i was only talking about electricity, not total emissions. france imports some electricity but is actually a net exporter of electricity. it's actually the largest exporter of electricity in europe by a comfortable margin https://www.ans.org/news/article-5844/france-leads-europe-as-largest-2023-energy-exporter/)

it’s not just electricity production that requires oil, coal and gas. i read somewhere lately that china has produced more concrete and steel construction in the last 20 years than all other countries in history combined.

they're also burning more coal than the rest of the world combined, and building more coal plants (around 95% of all new coal plants, singlehandedly pushing estimated peak coal out to 2027 now per the IEA), at the same time as they're building more solar and wind capacity than the rest of the world combined lol. and that's a country where, at least politically, there's nothing stopping the ccp elite from fundamentally breaking with the logic of accumulation and doing a hard pivot to clean energy; no other country has as strong a hand in the market

energy transition is weird. in 2024 texas installed more solar capacity than the rest of the united states combined (also leading in new installed wind capacity), installing about 8 times more than california, where there is a lot more democratic will to break the logic of accumulation for environmental means. texas isn't building solar and wind because they're green, but because it's a cheap source of energy (falling from 100$ per watt in the seventies to pennies today)... which is why trump is passing executive orders to ban it

ok - so do you think tooze is wrong? that we actually have done real energy transitions in the past, dispensing with old forms of energy production in favour of new ones, and that we can use those transitions as a guide for how we might accomplish what we need to accomplish as a planet?

ok - so do you think tooze is wrong? that we actually have done real energy transitions in the past, dispensing with old forms of energy production in favour of new ones, and that we can use those transitions as a guide for how we might accomplish what we need to accomplish as a planet?

That doesn’t seem like a very good guide tho

my reading from the excerpt was that he's saying *all* energy transitions are disruptive and don't follow a familiar pattern, so why would this one

maybe not. actually, i realized i don't care, so count me out of this convo if you haven't already

new board description lol

france was able to achieve that by, like much/all of the west, simply offshoring the production of much of its material needs. it’s not just electricity production that requires oil, coal and gas. i read somewhere lately that china has produced more concrete and steel construction in the last 20 years than all other countries in history combined.

anyway the whole piece is here - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/adam-tooze/trouble-transitioning

This fact appears in that very same article you link to (and FWIW I mentioned this in the LRB thread)

oh yeah duh.

i’m very interested to understand your POV here flopson because you obviously have some expertise. it just seems to me like it’s beside the point if this country or that country have reduced emissions, if, in toto, the planet is burning more coal than it ever has before. it doesn’t feel like we’ve “transitioned” from coal

when will we realise that we are all brothers and sisters?

― Tracer Hand

what i hate is that if i say "well hold on non-binary people exist too" i sound like a scold and i don't say it that way, it's just one of the challenges of... we're all so different that even words can be hard, sometimes.

happy to add one! equally happy to call you a brother and a sister - whatever it takes!

Are the “marxist equity programs” actually Marxist?

Are the “marxist equity programs” actually Marxist?