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zvaigzdelasas · 7 months

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"it was made by a person" does not absolve the image of sin, because by that logic every piece of ai art is ok actually. because obviously the ai could never just make art, the people using it to generate book covers so they don't have to pay an artist are actually typing in the description for what they want the ai to make. so it's ok !! a human told the ai to make that ❤❤❤❤

I mean. Other than the moralizing ("absolve of sin", "so it's ok!" etc)...Yes? Of course AI art is made by people?

Do you think AIs have agency or something? Do they find their own data and train themselves without a human telling it to? How does the AI pay for electricity?

If AIs have agency why can't they be Artists?

You're undermining your own position and actually fundamentally agreeing w the silicon valley tech bros lmao

If someone pays a human on Fiverr $5 to make a book cover in order to avoid paying someone a more reasonable price....thats basically the same moral situation right. If that guy on Fiverr is just choosing between 10 different templates he already has (and maybe copied from the internet!) and just changing the text on it, he is "typing what they want to make". What's the difference to paying someone $5 on Fiverr to generate a book cover for you using AI. Where's the moral difference, what does the tool have to do with anything.

AI doesn't have any agency, people do. AI is a tool. AI being used to lower prices is an economic choice made by humans.

A useful analytical framework to understand why this is the natural result of competition is actually Historical Materialism, which understands the social world as fundamentally existing of Humans, Human action, and Human relationships. Instead of trying to act like things like AI - spectral reflections of human labor - are "creatures" themselves, and tilting at windmills. Historical Materialism teaches not only why this happens, but how to overcome that process entirely.

In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself; [...]In machinery, objectified labour itself appears not only in the form of product or of the product employed as means of labour, but in the form of the force of production itself. The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper.[...]

In machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to [the worker]; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by [capital's] requirements.[...]

Fixed capital, in its character as means of production, whose most adequate form [is] machinery, produces value, i.e. increases the value of the product, in only two respects: (1) in so far as it has value; ***i.e. is itself the product of labour, a certain quantity of labour in objectified form***; (2) in so far as it increases the relation of surplus labour to necessary labour, by enabling labour, through an increase of its productive power, to create a greater mass of the products required for the maintenance of living labour capacity in a shorter time. It is therefore a highly absurd bourgeois assertion that the worker shares with the capitalist, because the latter, with fixed capital (which is, as far as that goes, itself a product of labour, and of alien labour merely appropriated by capital) makes labour easier for him (rather, he robs it of all independence and attractive character, by means of the machine), or makes his labour shorter. Capital employs machinery, rather, only to the extent that it enables the worker to work a larger part of his time for capital, to relate to a larger part of his time as time which does not belong to him, to work longer for another. Through this process, the amount of labour necessary for the production of a given object is indeed reduced to a minimum, but only in order to realize a maximum of labour in the maximum number of such objects. The first aspect is important, because capital here -- quite unintentionally -- reduces human labour, expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation.

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.

Marx [PDF link]

#other choice quotes in here but i figured thats enough #marx could easily explain ai

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txttletale · 11 months

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Hi Im a begginer marxist. I've read a few of his books and agree with his points, but there's something I don't quite understand yet as he hasn't addressed it all that much in the ones I've read so far which is: why do communists support wage equality? Although I definitely agree that every worker deserves the full product of ther labor, don't different jobs produce diferent amounts of value in the same period of time? And with supply and demand, wouldn't more necessary jobs still be paid more?

so the answer to this one is kinda just 'they don't, really'. communists are generally (in principle) opposed to the wage-form entirely. the marxist definition of a wage is 'the price of the commodity called labour-power'. that is:

Their commodity, labour-power, the workers exchange for the commodity of the capitalist, for money, and, moreover, this exchange takes place at a certain ratio. [...] The exchange value of a commodity estimated in money is called its price. Wages therefore are only a special name for the price of labour-power.

— Karl Marx, Wage Labour & Capital

alright, let's back up a bit. what does any of that mean? well, labour-power is a marxist concept that distinguishes 'labour' (that is, work, which is qualitative--work is done for a particular purpose, you labour to achieve something) vs. labour-power (that is, potential labour which is sold and therefore quantified--enumerated in hours or in finished products, the purpose of which is to receive compensation). unlike labour, labour-power is a commodity--which is to say, as well as a use value (it fulfils some kind of need or desire) it has an exchange value (it is exchanged for other commodities).

so 'wages' are the price of labour-power. what exists here to 'oppose', exactly? well, it's the very act of buying and selling labour-power, because labour-power is worth more than its price! that is, unlike every other sort of commodity, it is productive--when you purchase labour-power, that labour-power generates for you more value than you paid for it (e.g., when a starbucks barista is paid $10 an hour for a five-hour shift, they produce far more than $50 in profit by making and selling coffee). this is the fundamental economic engine of capitalist exploitation

however, the answer to this exploitation is not so much that 'workers deserve the full product of their labour', as you put it. one of the fundamental injustices of capitalism is that for the eight hours (or more!) of the day that one spends labouring, you have no control over your life or your work. you are selling this time of your life to somebody else--they have quite literally bought these hours from you. you are not spending them doing what you are doing, but spending them making money so that you can survive--you're alienated from the actual actions you take and product you produce, which become fungible and irrelevant.

in a communist (i.e. classless society), this sale of labour would no longer take place. you would not work to make money (that is, at a price, which is to say, for a wage)--your life would be your own and you would work to accomplish that which you are working towards. builders would not build houses so that they could get paid, but so that there would be houses for people to live in.

"alright, but that's pretty far-off, right?" yep! the abolition of the wage is not by any means a short-term or immediate goal. so do revolutionary socialist states in a transitional economy support total wage equality? nope. and it's not because of any bourgeois guff about some jobs being 'more important' than others--it's certainly not because of 'supply and demand', which is not a natural law but simply a law of the functioning of a labour market.

to understand why not every job would be compensated equally under socialism, let's take a look at how prices emerge. sure, every commodity's price is influenced by supply and demand. the more people are competing to buy it, the more necessary it is that each buyer outbids the others and so the higher the price. likewise, the more people are competing to sell it, the more necessary it is that each seller finds a means of of undercutting the other and so the lower the price.

but hold on--higher in relation to what? lower in relation to what? if supply & demand led to a potato costing $600, you'd probably say 'that's a fucking ridiculously high price for a potato'--but why? 'high' and 'low' are relative terms--supply and demand can drive prices 'up' or 'down' but they must be driven 'from' something. and that's simple--the basic price of a commodity is the cost of producing it. you expect a potato to be significantly less than $600 because it costs significantly less than that to grow one (1) potato.

what does that mean for wages (remember, they're just the price of labour-power)? the cost of producing labour-power (the potential to work) is, to be blunt, the cost of keeping the worker in question alive, able to have and raise children, and in a condition to work. now that last point is quite important--because there are some jobs that can be done by anybody with a warm body, and there are others that can only be done with years and years of training. you can get anyone off the street and get them to wait tables, even if they'll obviously not be as good as somebody who's done the job for a long time. you can't do the same with nuclear physicists or plumbers.

so--even in absence of the capitalist labour market (the competition betwen employers to buy labour and the competition between workers to sell it) the cost of producing labour-power is going to vary across jobs. it costs more to produce an hour of a doctor's labour than it does a waiter's, not because the doctor is more worthy or important a profession, but because that hour of labour is prefigured by years of medical school.

tldr: under communism, there will be no wages. under socialism, wages will vary according to their cost of production (and not according to prestige, or supply and demand) so long as some sort of exchange-economy is still maintained.

#ask #marxism

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thelastharbinger · 9 months

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Did not have the U.S. government holding hearings on previously classified information and lying making confirmations under oath that they are in possession of alien bodies and ufos in order to distract from the fact that covid-19 is still the leading cause of death in children, the cost of living is astronomical, cop city is well underway despite Atlanta residents overwhelmingly crying out against it, we are experiencing the hottest & deadliest temperatures on record, the state of Florida trying to rewrite history to say that slavery was just a mutually beneficial unpaid internship, trans lives and rights are under attack, anti drag laws, FLINT MICHIGAN STILL DOES NOT HAVE CLEAN DRINKING WATER, anti-discrimination laws being reversed, Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action, Roe v. Wade undone, universal free school lunches are on the ballot, ongoing mass shootings, climate change, big pharma killing off people by withholding live saving drugs at ungodly market prices, the erasure of separation of church and state, AI surveillance being implemented to detect fare evasion for increasingly costly public transport services, the rise of fascim, proud boys showing up with military grade weapons at libraries and day care centers, the permitted attempted coup of the capital, labor union strikes happening all over the country, people dying of heat in Texas because evil landlords want to cut off cooling over an unpaid $51 utility bill, train derailments causing toxic waste spills, corruption within the highest court in the land, homelessness rates the highest its ever been, migrants and asylum seekers being kicked out of temporary housing, the cost of food, book bans, Miranda Rights no longer being stated, mayors deciding to no longer publicly disclose how many people are dying pre-trial in detention facilities, federal minimum wage still $7.25, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, oil pipeline constructions on native lands, something like 30-50% of the nation's drinking water contaminated with forever chemicals, the rich remaining untaxed, biden going back on his campaign promises to forgive all student debt, still no free universal healthcare, ICE deportations increasing under biden admin, the u.s. yet maintaining colonies, teens and women getting jail time for miscarriages and abortions, 100 companies globally responsible for 70 or 80-something percent of all CO2 emissions, we are living in a police state, diseases resurfacing after years with no cases due to rising temps, death penalty, public services being defunded to increase military and police spending budgets, and abusers suing victims for defamation cases in court so that they legally cannot talk about it, and setting a dangerous precedent in the process in my 2023 bingo card but here we god damn are.

#2023 is a goddamn JOKE #aliens #us government #us govt #aliens and ufos #2023 bingo #land temp in spain was 140 degrees 2 days ago. owners r gonna have to start buying shoes for their pups out of obligation bc paws on fire.#i hate it here so bad #like can the aliens fix racism?

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permian-tropos · 4 months

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apologies but I'm going to have a little rant about "in socialism you can still buy a little treat" bc like? with what money? marx's socialism is moneyless. so who makes your little treat. are they coerced through an economic system of artificial resource scarcity to produce little treats for a consumer market, in doing so earning a wage to provide for their basic needs? no

its not like communism should prohibit the creation of nice things but it shouldn't coerce the creation of nice things, whether the commodity is created by a worker cooperative or a mega-corporation (although the former probably causes less immediate suffering than the latter)

there's this gem of an engels quote from an early essay (marx liking this essay is one of the reasons they became friends iirc) where he says, of the developing capitalist model, "economics took on a philanthropic character [and] it withdrew its favour from the producers and bestowed it on the consumers". of course he's being semi-ironic when he says it's philanthropic. capitalism is not at all generous to the workers, but it presents itself as generous to the consumers. look at all this nice stuff you can now obtain if you just obtain money! and money is obtained through hard work <3

I, too, like little treats. I have found satisfaction in using wages that I've earned to buy little treats. but I try not to fool myself into thinking it's a wholesome relationship between my time working (I actually like my job) and the object that I now own. someone else's labor went into this object. and the conditions under which it was created, due to it being a commodity, are inherently alienating to that laborer (even if they also happen to like their job! alienation is not synonymous with suffering although they're usually linked)

shatter the shackles of consumerist thinking. expand your imagination to envision a world where nobody has to make a little treat for you if they don't want to. ask yourself instead: do you want to make little treats for the world to share? do you, with all your basic needs provided for, want to go work at the little treat factory, with the reward being the satisfaction of creating something you love and want to give to the world?

communism is not a world of consumption being life's prime want, but creation, because labor is the creative force of a creative species

#i deliberated about whether to post this bc like. what if its too aggressive #theres a mesopotamian proverb thats like. one who knows but does not speak is a fool #so perhaps I should speak if I think I knows #even if I don't knows. its worth the risk

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dragonomatopoeia · 3 months

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i think a lot of discussion surrounding 'the male loneliness epidemic' ignores the prevalence of urban isolation and the alienation felt by many under capitalism, packaging it as something unique to men. Marx's theory of alienation applies to all laborers, and artificially segmenting the phenomenon or applying it to One Gender only serves to foster misdirected resentment

there is, of course, the additional element of societal expectations that this loneliness is naturally assuaged through a romantic partner, and that when someone is 'deprived' of that partner, their loneliness has no remedy

this means that the individual, already in possession of little free-time and less contact with their community, is more likely to fixate on or pursue a romantic partnership in the hopes that it will Fix Them, and will encounter greater and greater despair when this pharmakon eludes them

#this is even without discussing the racialized elements and the affixed cultural expectations

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pierayanna · 2 months

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watching smallville is helping me unpack the ethos of white America.

They completely misrepresented human nature in order to perpetuate capitalism and colonialism.

Instead of the reality of humans being and existing as animals within nature and noting that our evolution and beginning of society was because of our innate sense of empathy and drive for community, our first sign of civilization being that of a healed bone showing that someone protected, fed, cared for, etc. someone else while they healed, we developed sciences, math, art, healing practices not simply for ourselves but to connect and enjoy one another, we have a manufactured reality that we are “born in sin,” innately greedy, selfish, yearning for power. This manufactured misrepresentation is because we are only “allowed” to study white men. Value and humanity is only allotted to white men who now represent human nature. We ignore and devalue indigenous teachings and practices. This makes us accepts the ideas and implications of capitalism and colonialism. We accept the idea that we need to be policed and governed despite the fact that crime diminishes without poverty (why aren’t white neighborhoods as policed and still safe and functioning??) and our accountability to community is what kept society safe and functioning. We accept imperialism and European paternalism. We accept individualism over collective. It endangers us. We accept racism: “there’s always going to be an in group and out group. An us vs them.” Something I’ve heard from peers in “anti-racist” classrooms. We accept this murder of the earth.

We accept the idea that we have to do things. I just realized how powerful the joke, “all I have to do is be Black and die,” is: all we have to do is be and then stop being. We most definitely don’t have to live this uniform, crappy, traumatizing life. We now believe our deserving of love and rest is depending on our productivity. We accept uniform lifestyles despite how unique we all are. We accept unlivable wages, no access to healthcare, inflation, having to pay to exist (food, shelter, water, etc.), horribly lacking miseducation systems, the majority of our lives dedicated to bringing wealth to 1% who spend it on sick shit. We accept wage slavery. We accept chattel slavery (mass incarceration). We accept the fact that children must be enslaved and maimed to give us phones and clothing. We blindly accept propaganda. We accept the fact that America can not fund any of these things for community but can fund wars and ethnic cleansing. But if they were to do anything remotely similar here, we would meddle in their continent for years!! We claim the existence of first world countries and this world countries when our “first world country” is surviving on the land, labor and people of “third world countries.” We accept food apartheid that prevents a lot of people from boycotting heinous companies. We accept the alienation and are lonely with no sense of community.

We accept the idea of anarchy as unbridled chaos, raping, pillaging, murder. No. That’s what’s happening now under this policing institution. Under capitalism and colonialism. Smallville ended an episode about a child veteran who lost his life in combat with the line that he sacrificed his life [in the US military] “saving the world.” Nevermind the fact that he enlisted because he was too poor to pursue college and football like he wanted, but to equate, unequivocally, the US military with saving the world was a powerful statement. How unchecked our propaganda media is. To end an episode with this assertion, left no room for it to be questioned: no thought into why the boy was in this foreign country or what he was doing there and how was it “saving the world.” No room for knowledge. I recall photos and accounts that resurface much later detailing what Americans really do in these foreign countries. What they do to the people. “Winners write history.” For the first time, I am able to see just how one-sided mainstream news outlets are. They show, and now force Americans to live in, a false reality. Journalists are supposed to be protected. But apparently only the ‘winner’s’ journalists are.

People like to claim tv shows, social media, etc. isn’t important and shouldn’t be taken serious. To focus of politics in government. This is art. This is what people are spending most of the free time allotted them consuming. This is an institution. Just as government. Just as religion.

Even in their falsehoods, we can still see the truth. Speaking of this institution that has been weaponized by those in power, didn’t Jesus save us? By your own logic, did he not free us from this so called evil human nature? As someone who has descended from people who were enslaved during chattel slavery, my lens for Christianity has always been different. I never identified with the whitewashed, white supremacist, policing, institutional state force misrepresentation of Jesus and questioned the attempts of the Black church to make him so. Why would he subscribe to the made up idealogy of gender that only exist to reinforce white supremacy? Why would he want me silenced? Why do I have to wear a dress? Why is being ladylike important as a Christian? Why would homosexuality be considered wrong while murdering and spreading hatred was not (mistranslation closer to pedophilia and mostly mentioned in the Old Testament)? I learned to contextualize and understand the history during the Bible and its translations over time. I identified with the wooly haired and “burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace” Jesus that was yelling and flipping tables. I identified with the Jesus that was about listening to sex workers and against policing. I identified with Jesus that ate with people deemed unsavory by the white regime and others of his own people that were hypocrites. I identified with the Jesus that sacrificed for his community, died young, and was about love for oneself and one’s neighbors. Religious trauma has pushed many Black spiritualists away, but I urge people to learn from the theology and not from what it has been weaponized to propose. God is in us. We are made in their image. We are reflections of one another. I feel this when I observe nature. When I experience humanity. I see the patterns throughout other religions as well that seem to reinforce this same premise. I recall indigenous cultures that “worship,” another westernized concept, or express gratitude to things in nature by name. Why not if you see these living things just as valuable as you are? Christians express gratitude for these specific things in nature to One being.

I implore people to alchemize their anger and frustration and guilt. Allow these things to radicalize you. What other purpose right now besides liberation?

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bread--quest · 6 months

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oc tournament: round 3 match 1

Jimmy:

guy who grew up normally in new york city. well normally except for the undiagnosed anxiety and adhd but other than that

theater kid in high school (very embarrassed about it now)

went to college for journalism, wanted to become an Actual Reporter but ended up working at knockoff buzzfeed instead

Hates It Here! so much. man is a miserable wet cat.

23-Year-Old Lies About Every Single Aspect Of His Life To Keep His Parents From Worrying

middle name is ellsburg (like daniel ellsburg, the guy who leaked the pentagon papers)

semi-canon (from a Phanta Crossover Event story i wrote once): being haunted by the ghost of the guy who used to live in his childhood home. jimmy as a kid looked up the name of the guy (it's Anthony) and tried to learn all about him and now he's like the only person alive who remembers anthony so anthony's following him around <3

cannot sleep without at least one other person around. gets really embarrassed if you point it out

hasn't cut his hair in months because he's afraid of scissors

walks around at work every day like ohhhh my god something is fucking wrong with me im fucking insane im like the american psycho. this is literally not true. jimmy you are not a bad person you are just experiencing alienation of labor under capitalism and also really bad undiagnosed anxiety. please eat a normal meal

005:

from FUTURE new york city (~2040s, i think)

clone created by legally distinct watchmojo (now owned by knockoff buzzfeed)

this is why their name is 005. what happened to 1-4? Dont Worry About It :)

specifically created to record the audio for the stupid countdown videos watchmojo churns out endlessly

why do they have to do this? WELL.

discount watchmojo (now owned by buzzfeed which is probably now owned by amazon but mainly. watchmojo) workers go on strike. because it is the future corporations are worse but the unions are better so the strike is held at stalemate for a really long time and legally distinct watchmojo starts thinking of ways to make Content™️ without workers

enter the modern unethical corporation's solution: clones

they live in a room and make videos. as time goes on they start deviating from their given scripts more and more and interjecting comments. eventually it just kind of spirals into Top 10 Reasons I Am So Afraid And Terrified And Let Me Out Of Here

then there are machinations and the union gets in touch with 005 through youtube comments and ?? breakout shenanigans violence i havent nailed down this part yet

anyway point is they get out and get kind of collectively adopted by the entire union and also specifically future!renuti (who is one of the organizers) and also future!jimmy (who is not involved in the union and is having the weirdest fucking day)

if you read through all that i love you here's a little reward. 005 eventually chooses a different name (haven't figured out what yet) and ends up using he/she/they pronouns :)

#sonder oc tournament #in case you can't tell i've been like. mixing up the stuff i post about them #round 1 was basic character summary round 2 was personality/likes and dislikes #this round is backstories and random fun facts!!

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chronostachyon · 10 months

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Came across your responses to the post about spiderverse nimona and anarchism\communism, loved the tags too, thank you for your responses!

This is long and mostly not related to your ask, but since you liked my tag ramble I thought I'd share my deeper thoughts on the matter.

Firstly, I think anarchists and MLs waste so much energy by fighting amongst ourselves rather than paying attention to the fact that we hold more beliefs in common than anything. I suspect there's a lot of disinfo from capitalist regimes to try to divide us; we know for a fact thanks to FOIA that the US government (CIA and FBI) has infiltrated both in the past, in order to keep us divided and bickering! Both the anarchist and ML camps have bad actors, many of which are being encouraged by imperialist plants, capitalist propaganda, and/or the unquenchable human instinct for groupthink, but there are a lot of genuinely good people doing genuinely good work in both camps too, and it makes me sad that we don't work together more often.

One of the reasons I consider myself an anarcho-communist, rather than a Marxist-Leninist or pure Marxist of any stripe, is because of an insight I got from Marx himself! Among their many reading sources, anarchists should read Marx too! But Marx also got bogged down in the idea that revolution had to be a process achieved through violent overthrow of the capitalist state, and replacing it with a new state, rather than eroding the capitalist state at the foundations until it washed away as he'd originally envisioned in his Manifesto / Das Kapital era. He also lost sight of the fact that alienation of labor, as he originally envisioned it, is not merely about alienation from the profits of labor, but alienation from the purpose of labor: working on something because someone in charge tells you to work on it is inherently dehumanizing, no matter how the profits are distributed. We need a personal connection to our labor, to personally see the ways in which our labor benefits our community! Even under Lenin and Mao, the USSR and PRC were alienating laborers from their own labor by assigning jobs to them instead of letting them pick and choose among the jobs that needed to be done.

And the very concept that some people deserve to rule over others, to lord over them with "superior information" and tell them what to do, is inherently kyriarchal and eugenics-adjacent, making it very easy to slide into red-brown fascism and to perpetuate sexist/racist/queermisic/ableist beliefs. Everybody gets it wrong sometimes! Marx, Lenin, Mao, Trotsky, but anarchist writers too! The more power you concentrate into fewer hands, the worse the consequences when we inevitably make mistakes, and then we have the instinctual human response to not want to admit that we fucked up and to pretend that the mistake never happened, and the bigger the scope of the harm the stronger that instinct is when it kicks in.

(It's also weird the sheer number of MLs who stan Putin's capitalist kleptocracy in 2023, as if communism and capitalism themselves were always just strategies in a global football game between empires over whether the East or the West deserved total power over everyone else in the world. I can honestly understand China stans more than Russia stans, because China is at least nominally still communist, even if it abandoned Maoism ages ago. But MLs really should be pointing more at Cuba or Vietnam than at any imperial power if they want to convince us that statist communism can actually work for the people.)

#leftism #communism #anarchism #marxism leninism

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wumblr · 2 years

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i'm seeing a few pontificating posts and i'm not sure how to really explain the situation we are in. so i guess i'd like to coin a term like "fictitious capital" or something to describe the way that, specifically, exclusively, by and large, whatever -- intentionally and by design under capitalism -- products and services are bad. it's not an accident that peloton or juicero or tesla or uber or doordash or mcdonalds or walmart or amazon or facebook are not selling well made products. it's not a coincidence google search results got worse, they were redesigned to become better at something else

at best, disruptive economies of scale can only ever pitch a fever dream of a product, beg for venture capital, go public to distort their corporate valuation and print money to scale with, while outsourcing production, cutting labor costs to absorb bad quarterly numbers, hemorrhaging money to bleed out the competition and then absorbing the debt in either a merger/acquisition or spinoff corporation after they're the only player left in the market, at which point they can cut costs and jack up the prices to hell. this is a game to the rich. the richer you are, the more dice rolls you get to try for a unicorn

that's literally it, that's all there is to it, and there is no limit to the number of people they will kill to keep it that way. it's not a coincidence everything's wrapped in plastic, plastic is a petrochemical derivative. these capital schemes are so alienated from the production itself that it, frankly, does not make any sense to criticize the quality of products. what else would they be? you bought into a cheap scam, it's all capitalism has to offer. of course a vast portion of it could be better designed, or production ceased altogether, but how are you going to get people to stop buying into the fiction?

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feminist-theory-blog · 1 year

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Class Theory Written Post

Marxist feminism is a theory that regards classism and capitalism as the fundamental cause of women’s oppression. They argue that this capitalist system has perpetuated the idea that a woman’s body is the site for her labor. They argue that class differences under capitalism divide us like nothing else. I would like to apply this lens to the body positivity movement especially where it pertains to the fat acceptance and anti ableist movements.

There is a trend on Tiktok right now consisting of people out on the street asking strangers their opinion on ‘hot’ topics. For example, asking if blue balls are real, or if they think gay marriage should be legal. I will show one of these videos in another post, but a trend I see a lot is asking people’s opinions about fat bodies, especially fat women. These videos ask men if they would date a fat woman, if they would have sex with a fat woman, if their parents would approve of them being attracted to fat women. The most popular response given to these questions are that fat women are lazy, unproductive, and cannot maintain the ‘active’ lifestyle that they are looking for.

Society views fat bodies as a hindrance, simply because they are not perceived as being meaningful laborers or contributors to society. Men regard fat women as terrible partners because what they understand about fat women is that they cannot be workers. They cannot ‘match’ them in a physical sense. I heard someone having a debate once, about whether being fat was morally acceptable. They ultimately decided no, because fat people need more financial assistance from the government, which means that they did something to themselves that now everybody has to pay for. “Because all commodities are worth exactly the labor necessary to produce them and because workers’ labor power (capacity for work) is a commodity that can be bought and sold, the value of workers’ labor power is exactly the cost of whatever it takes (food, clothing, shelter) to maintain them throughout the workday” (Tong pg. 98) Fat individuals are simply not valued under the limitations of a capitalist society. Fat is not deemed morally acceptable despite the intentions of the individual with the body.

Being able to focus entirely on weight loss or a healthy lifestyle is a privilege. Many individuals and families do not have physical or financial access to nutritious food, nor do they have the time to prioritize calorie deficits or going to the gym daily. Weight loss is a luxury, and thus overweight individuals are seen as lazy, poor, noncontributors to society. “Alienation is a profoundly fragmenting experience. Things or persons who are or should be connected in some significant way are instead viewed as separate. As Heilbroner saw it, this sense of fragmentation and meaninglessness is particularly strong under capitalism” (Tong, pg. 101). Weight indicates class to many, and the separation grows.

The same is true for disabled individuals, whose bodies are seen as being sub par and unable to contribute to society. People view accommodations as unfair advantages to those with disabilities, again using tax money to aid them. This goes along with the Marxist feminist ideas that a women’s bodies are seen as a site to their labor.

“Some children turn on their mothers, blaming them for everything that goes wrong in their lives: 'I'm a failure because you, my mother, loved me too much/too little’”(pg 115). This quote is in regards to how, in traditional roles, the mother acts as the domestic worker and leads the children and father to team up against the mother. This is due to social capitalistic ideals placed around working, intelligence, and more. There is this phrase on social media, referred to as an ‘almond mom’. An almond mom is known as a mother who keeps the house stocked with little to no food, healthy food at that. These moms eat a handful of almonds for dinner, and claim that they’re full after an appetizer at a restaurant. They refuse dessert and are blamed as the sole reason gen z young adults have eating disorders. The truth is that our mothers were faced with even harder stereotypes and body shaming than we were growing up. The husbands of these almond mothers joke about this with their children, but these husbands also contribute to the expectations that the mother faces. These mothers also definitely contribute to unhealthy relationships with food for their children, especially young daughters. They just don’t realize that they are victims to the same disease. Just like in the marxist example, young daughters are fated to end up like their mothers in the culture they live in. Instead of supporting each other they just end up splitting up into mother vs. father and children.

Overall as a society, I would say that we have decreased the frequency of people judging bodies for morality and character, but it isn't gone. Ask any woman you know or yourself, and find many examples of being reduced to your physical features. I still hear stories and see examples of men who don’t even genuinely regard women as people. People think that sexism is gone because the feminist movement exists, people think that fat phobia or ableism doesn’t exist because of the body positivity movement. Just don’t stop questioning the reality you live in and assessing where things may not be perfectly fixed.

#theory #feminist theory #feminist analysis #body positivity movement #feminism #The Bodyweight of the World

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olreid · 1 year

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[ID 1 and 2: My power to reproduce myself, whether through healthcare or simply eating the dinner I cooked with the food I bought with my wages, is mediated by the other's power to command my labour embodied in this very wage. Money has the astounding power of transforming conditions into their opposites: 'I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame.'

Here, Marx actually confirms the 'economic model of disability,' insofar as he distinguishes between 'individual characteristics' and the political condition of 'lameness.' Marx plainly argues that the possessor of enough money to command the labour of others (the twenty-four feet) is precisely not lame -- or disabled, in today's parlance. Personal impairment is not the limit of our relationships, indeed as Marx conceives things it does not even disqualify one from membership of an exploitative bourgeoisie.

He continues: 'Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?' This observation clearly still holds true. Money is precisely the medium of transforming the 'I cannot' into the 'I can' in capitalist society. It is the primary means by which the primordial experience of incapacity is displaced and opened onto expansive possibilities.

Marx again: 'Money is the alienated ability of mankind. That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of those powers into something which in itself it is not -- turns it, that is, into its contrary.' end ID]

one other thing as long as im excerpt posting is that the chapter i read yesterday makes an argument for an economic model of disability which posits that disabled people's oppression is at base an economic relation, and further that money is disability's opposite due to its radical capacitating power in capitalist society. while disability is defined as the experience of "i cannot," money in capitalist society is what transforms "i cannot" into "i can." i am still struggling somewhat with this framing - for one i think this theory comes up against the place where chronic pain/chronic illness and disabilities without associated pain diverge. the social model fails here too when it says the deaf person is disabled by the society which refuses to learn their language but cannot account for the chronically pained person who is disabled not be social structures but their own bodily systems. i guess you could pay for tons of painkillers but the point is that there are some people whose disability is not - or not fully - an abstracted social or economic relation and is in fact a condition that is ultimately located in the body of the disabled individual..

also i don't really think the states of being inherently capable of doing something under your own power and being capable of something because you have the wealth to pay someone to do it are as equivalent as this framing wants me to believe. there just is a difference between being able to do something yourself and needing someone else to do it for you, even if you can afford to pay them for doing so.. the text itself acknowledges this in another moment when discussing the stripping of social services that necessitates paying for things like childcare, healthcare, food, etc. etc.:

[ID: This is no stable basis for the development of our capacities, for us to reach the 'I can.' To have the services that keep you alive and well be mediated by the abstract medium of money, embodied in the form of the wage, is to have one's capacity to remain alive and well mediated by the other. end ID]

like even after or outside of capitalism my ability to survive would still be mediated by the other because i still would be reliant on others for reproductive labor, i just presumably wouldn't be paying them as a part of that relationship of dependency.... idk.

anyway. all that said i did really like this paper and it clearly gave me a lot to think about due to i am still thinking about it 24 hours later. so. posting it here. hashtag book club blogging

#currently reading #<- not rly but. close enough #ill-made knight

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the-single-element · 6 months

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Good morning.

In today's Good News, we begin the second phase of the Jerusalem Debates. The authorities whom Jesus embarrased with that question about John have decided to retaliate against Jesus with the same tactic: to ask him a question with no good answers.

The result is a famous exchange that has been interpreted... many different ways, over the years. Jesus's answer to the question is often deployed in arguments about the relationship between Church and State, and about how or whether to bring our convictions about God into politics. It's a bitter sort of joke, given that the answer in question was carefully crafted by Jesus to sidestep a thorny political debate of his own time.

But that's not the only thing it was crafted to do.

So let's begin with the context of what this controversial tax even was. Israel, at the time, was an occupied territory under the thumb of the Roman Empire. One of Rome's methods of extracting weath from its subjects was "head tax", where every person was supposed to contribute a denarius (the "laborer's daily wage" mentioned elsewhere in the Good News). Of note: citizens were exempt from this tax; it was paid only by the subjugated, and served, in part, the social purpose of highlighting that subjugation.

Needless to say, this was very unpopular in Jerusalem. But it wasn't just unpopular for being unfair, or for being a microcosm of the Roman occupation in general. Rather, the fact that the money was going to an emperor who styled himself divine... well, for some, there was the issue of idolatry, right? Of offerings to foreign gods. It was a wedge issue for the biggest and most contentious political divide of Second Temple Judah: between the "zealots", who violently resisted Northern Mediterranean assimilation, and the "Hellenists" who were already somewhat culturally Greek. By Jesus's time, there had already been one failed rebellion over it, where the zealot revolutionaries tended to burn down the houses of people willing to play by Caesar's rules.

So Jesus faced three dangers, when he was asked this question. First, there were the pure practical consequences: speaking out against the tax could get you arrested by the Romans, while calling it permissible would invite mob reprisals. Then there was the risk of alienating half his audience; which of us "politically minded" people in America would keep listening to a favorite teacher if we found out he'd recently endorsed someone of the wrong political party?

But the worst risk was that Jesus's already chronic problem with being misunderstood would only intensify if people could slot him neatly into a political bucket. Everything else he'd try to say, from then on, would be heard as if it was more polemic on the Roman Topic, even though what he'd come to Earth to teach people was about something very different.

Thankfully, Jesus is used to this particular type of trick question. He's been asked one before - about the woman caught cheating on her husband, where his critics tried to get him to choose between either openly going against Moses, or else advocating for religious capital punishment (which, by that time, Temple authorities usually tried to avoid imposing in practice, and anyway would be illegal under Roman law).

In cases like these, Jesus's favorite technique seems to be to thread the needle by deriving his answer, not from Torah, but from the behavior of the very people who asked the trick question. "Let the one without sin throw the first stone" seems on its face to go along with the law being quoted, but in practice prevents the punishment from being carried out - which ends up in a very similar place to what Jewish folks were doing anyway. Simultaneously, he manages to make the event yet another warning against knee-jerk condemnation.

This same technique is what Jesus deploys in today's Good News. He turns the question back on the ones who asked it: "if you have an objection to paying taxes to Caesar, where's your objection to using his coins, with his head stamped where images of the Roman gods used to be? If paying tribute to Rome is idolatry, wouldn't that mean that having a graven image in your house, and using it every day, is even more idolatrous?"

Once again, Jesus has threaded the needle. First, he avoids the danger, by giving an answer that both the Herodians and the Zealots would accept; to one used to Northern Mediterranean culture, he's calling the whole matter ridiculous (with the famous "render Caesar's to Caesar, and God's to God" conclusion maybe even inventing the "separation of Church and State", if you squint). To the Zealots? This is calling and raising them - presenting a provocative view, perhaps, but one very in line with their desire to un-Romanize the Holy Land (and to them, his concluding statement might have sounded more like "throw away what is Caesar's so that you can focus on God"). Either way, it strengthens him rhetorically, and weakens his debate partners by making them look inconsistent, lukewarm instead of hot or cold (as we once heard him put it via John of Patmos).

But then - just as in the case of the adulterous woman - Jesus takes this answer one step further, and swings it back to one of his central teachings. Recall how suspicious Jesus has always been of wealth, and the way it tends to bend our moral thinking. Consider that, whoever was listening to his answer, the undercurrent was to belittle the coin itself. A Hellenist might hear him call Caesar's coin unnecessary to the work of God, a separate magisterium. A Zealot might hear him call the coin actively dangerous. Either one, then, would be more primed to hear what he actually wants them to learn: that to do God's work you must sometimes throw earthly riches away. It's only a little later, in Mark and Luke's Good News, that we'd have the chance to see a poor widow using a much smaller coin to pay a much steeper tax, this time to God rather than to Rome. Perhaps even high enough to touch the Kingdom with it.

That's the potential that Jesus is trying to get us to aspire to. If Caesar is irrelevant to the Kingdom, what is relevant?

Well, Jesus has hidden one more clever metaphor in his exhortation here. If you can tell that the Roman coin is Caesar's because Caesar's image is on it, then what bears God's image? Just as the image of Caesar stamped on a denarius coin makes it valuable to those who care about Caesar, our fellow human beings - made in the image of God - should be valued to those of us who want to go about doing God's will. And just like Caesar's coin returns to Caesar, our own "metanoia", our own reorientation towards God, is the journey we're called to make.

In other words... "return to God", and "care for each other". The same message Jesus has been trying to get us to understand all year.

We're reaching the end of Jesus's message, this late in the year. This preaching he did in Jerusalem was some of his last work: an attempt to recapitulate the important points, and put a bow on things, before he went to the Cross to teach his final lesson. In doing so, he's once again showing us how to follow him, whether we're new to the idea (like Cyrus, who did God's will despite never being a Jew) or doing it on purpose after much practice (like the Thessalonians who Paul thanks so profusely in his letter).

So, if Jesus took this moment to focus on what really matters, let's do that, too: refocus ourselves on the Kingdom of God, and in doing so, enter safe into his treasury.

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unwilting · 7 months

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The law of value works in mysterious ways. For some Marxists, it underlies everything we need to know about capitalism.1 But, just as Karl Marx claimed he was not a Marxist, so too might he have said, “that’s not my law of value.”

It Is All about the Allocation of Labor

Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour. — Karl Marx

Every society must allocate its aggregate labor in such a way as to obtain the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of its needs. As Marx commented, “In so far as society wants to satisfy its needs, and have an article produced for this purpose, it has to pay for it.… It buys them with a certain quantity of the labour-time that it has at its disposal.”4 It must allocate “differing and quantitatively determined” amounts of labor to the production of goods and services for direct consumption (Department II) and a similarly determined quantity of labor for the production and reproduction of means of production (Department I).

Every society, too, must allocate labor to what we may call Department III, a sector that produces means of regulation, and may contain institutions such as the police, the legal authority, the ideological and cultural apparatus, and so on.

Reproduction of a Socialist Society

Consider a socialist society—“an association of free [individuals], working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force.”5 Having identified the differing amounts of needs it wishes to satisfy, this society of associated producers allocates its differing and quantitatively determined labor through a conscious process of planning….. “A communal production, communality, is presupposed as the basis of production.”

Conscious planning—a visible hand, a communal hand—is the condition for building a socialist society.

Reproduction of a Society Characterized by Commodity Production

But what about a society that is not characterized by communality, a society marked instead by separate, autonomous actors? Such a society’s essential premise is the separation of independent producers.13

Rather than a community of producers, there is a collection of autonomous property owners who depend for satisfaction of their needs upon the productive activity of other owners.

“All-around dependence of the producers upon one another” exists, but theirs is a “connection of mutually indifferent persons.” Indeed, “their mutual interconnection—here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing.” Yet, if these “individuals who are indifferent to one another” do not understand their connection, how does this society go about allocating its “differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour” to satisfy its “differing amounts of needs”?14

Equalization of profit rates “presupposes the development of the credit system, which concentrates together the inorganic mass of available social capital vis-á-vis the individual capitalist.”27 That is, it presupposes the domination of finance capital: bankers “become the general managers of money capital,” which now appears as “a concentrated and organized mass, placed under the control of the bankers as representatives of the social capital in a quite different manner to real production.”28

Marx’s Auto-Critique

With respect to a particular review, Marx commented to Kugelmann in July 1868 that the need to prove the law of value reveals “complete ignorance both of the subject under discussion and of the method of science.” Every child, Marx here continued, knows that “the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour.” How could the critic not see that “It is SELF-EVIDENT that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production!”

Marx wrote to Frederick Engels in January 1868 that “actually, no form of society can prevent the labour time at the disposal of society from regulating production in ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.”

The classical economists began by explaining relative value by the quantity of labor-time, but they “never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the value of the product.”32 Their analysis, in short, started in the middle. This classical approach characterized Marx’s own early thought. It is important to recognize that Marx’s critique was an auto-critique, a critique of views he himself had earlier accepted.

Marx followed Ricardo in his early work. “The fluctuations of supply and demand,” Marx wrote in Wage Labour and Capital, “continually bring the price of a commodity back to the cost of production” (that is to say, to its “natural price”). This was Ricardo’s theory of value: the “determination of price by the cost of production is equivalent to the determination of price by the labour time necessary for the manufacture of a commodity.” Further, this rule applied to the determination of wages as well, which were “determined by the cost of production, by the labour time necessary to produce this commodity—labour.”35 The same point was made in the Communist Manifesto in 1848: “the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production.”36

In the 1850s, however, Marx began to develop a new understanding. In the notebooks written in 1857–58, which constitute the Grundrisse, he began his critique of classical political economy. Marx concluded the Grundrisse by announcing that the starting point for analysis had to be not value (as Ricardo began), but the commodity, which “appears as unity of two aspects”—use value and exchange value.37 The commodity and, in particular, its two-sidedness is the starting point for his critique and how he begins both his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Capital.38

The Best Points in Capital

“As regards value in general, classical political economy in fact nowhere distinguishes explicitly and with a clear awareness between labour as it appears in the value of a product, and the same labour as it appears in the product’s use value.”39 But that distinction, Marx declared to Engels in August 1867, is “fundamental to all understanding of the FACTS”! That “two-fold character of labour,” he indicated, is one of the “best points in my book” (and indeed, the best point in the first volume of Capital).40

The secret of the critical conception, the starting point for comprehension of political economy, the basis for all understanding of the facts—what made the revelation of the two-fold character of labor in commodities so important? Very simply, it is the recognition that actual, specific, concrete labor, all those hours of real labor that have gone into producing a particular commodity, in themselves have nothing to do with its value. You cannot add the hours of the carpenter’s labor to the labor contained in consumed means of production and come up with the value of the carpenter’s commodity. That specific labor, rather, has gone into the production of a thing for use, also known as a use value. Further, you cannot explain relative values by counting the quantity of specific labor contained in separate use values. If you do not distinguish clearly between the two-fold aspects of labor in the commodity, you have not understood Marx’s critique of classical political economy.

Marx’s Labor Theory of Money

“We have to perform a task,” Marx announced, “never even attempted by bourgeois economics.”43 That task was to develop his theory of money—in particular, to reveal that money is the social representative of the aggregate labor in commodities. For this, Marx demonstrated that (1) the concept of money is latent in the concept of the commodity and (2) that money represents the abstract labor in a commodity and that the manifestation of the latter, its only manifestation, is the price of the commodity.

We can approach grasping the value of a commodity only by considering it in a relation. The simplest (but undeveloped) form of this relation is as an exchange value—the value of commodity A is equal to x units of commodity B, where B is a use value. We always knew A as a use value but now we know the value of A from its equivalent in B.

Having established that the value of a commodity is revealed through its equivalent, Marx logically proceeds step-by-step to establish the existence of a commodity that serves as the equivalent for all commodities—that is, is the general form of value. It is a mini-step from there to reveal the monetary form of value: money as the universal equivalent, money as the representative of value.45 In short, once we begin to analyze a commodity-exchanging society, we are led to the concept of money.

The value of a commodity (that is, the homogeneous, general, abstract labor in the commodity) is represented by the quantity of money, which is its equivalent. Indeed, the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself is the money-form.

How do we satisfy our needs within capitalism? We buy them with the representative of the total social labor in commodities—money.

Ignorance both of the Subject under Discussion and of the Method of Science

The concept of capital, in short, does not drop from the sky. It is marked by the preceding categories. Since money is the representative of abstract labor, of the homogeneous aggregate labor of society, capital must be understood as an accumulation of homogeneous, abstract labor.

However, all accumulations of abstract labor are not capital. For them to correspond to the concept of capital, they must be driven by the impetus to grow and must have self-expanding value (i.e., M-C-M´). How is that possible, however, on the assumption of exchange of equivalents? Where does the additional value, the surplus value, come from? The two questions express the same thing: in one case, in the form of objectified labour; in the other, in the form of living, fluid labor.56

The answer to both is that, with the availability of labor power as a commodity, capital can now secure additional (abstract) labor.…because by purchasing labor power, capital now is in a relation of “supremacy and subordination” with respect to workers, a relation that brings with it the “compulsion to perform surplus labour.”57 That compulsion, inherent in capitalist relations of production, is the source of capital’s growth.

…The ratio of surplus labor to necessary labor—the rate of exploitation—rises.

#emphasis my own #filed under: marxism #filed under: political economy #filed under: capitalism #law of value #marx

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bossbutch · 11 months

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the current Discourse, i of course say current to mean its probably old news by now, but the current Discourse wrt disability benefits post-revolution really is a great example of how much discourse doesnt matter at all. for those not familiar, the premise is: The Revolution has happened. The dictatorship of the proletariat has been firmly established, and workers are no longer alienated from the product of their labor. As a necessary part of this happening, the excesses- of capitalism, of life in the Global North- have been curbed. People that perform the labor that society needs to function are treated well, and do-nothing jobs are nonexistent or at least heavily reduced. The discourse wants us to accept that, under these conditions, the group of "people who Simply Do Not Want To Work" would be large enough to cause Real Problems if they were put on disability welfare, and we would have to Do Something about it, with means testing disability being the proposed solution. This is not politics, this is speculative fiction. we suppose a system where unlike the benefits of power and passive income that ie landlording gets you today, all there is to gain from being a "Welfare Queen" is the benefit of Not Working. in a society where work would, by definition, be far more enjoyable and communal. If such a scenario were to actually come about- what a wonderful problem to have, compared to the present! I'm sure the communists of the future, who will not have to speculate about how their society is structured like we do, will be infinitely more equipped to handle it than we are.

#love u sophie leviathan <3 its healthy for good bloggers to have occasional bad takes #disability #my opinion on All “but how should we do X after The Revolution?” debates is: ask me again after the revolution is done #if you really think this is worth thinking about. you must expect revolution Soon right? thats great news cant wait

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sawwyouuinadream · 1 year

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In a world which is split, alienated, untrue to itself, this unity of the world is torn and reconfigured under the totalitarianism of alienated existence. Capital aims at becoming the social whole, at subordinating everything to itself and reorganizing the world around its all-devouring growth. As Marx taught us, capital originates from the way the relations between living beings are organized, but also dominates these beings. By doing so, it acts “behind the backs of the actors.” In a word, capitalism becomes second nature in a dual sense — it literally operates above and beyond the individuals who create it the same way that natural, physical processes like gravitational pull do, and it appears to individuals in capitalist society as the natural order of the world.

Marx tried to describe this phenomena in the related concepts of commodity fetishism, where value appears as a characteristic of objects themselves rather than as socially created, and of real abstraction, abstract categories like labor-as-such or value-as-such which operate in everyday life. The division of labor and growing scale and density of society in turn make society into something like a massive machine, where it is impossible for any individual to comprehend or control the whole thing. What he always emphasized is that capitalism is literally mystified, and that this mystification occurs both on the level of our social whole and on the level of subjective consciousness.

With this in mind, an uncritical form of appealing to “lived experience” seems quite problematic. Not only can our consciousness about the world be mystified, and fail to understand — the world itself can be mystified? How can we be sure we understand the world, or even ourselves? If our lived experience is complacent with this mystification (and vice versa), then how can it be a reliable appeal for emancipatory truth?

One answer to this unreliability would be to simply identify that truth with the whole rather than the individual, to say that truth on an individual scale falls apart and that one only reaches truth when the truth-seeker is identical to the object they seek truth about. The individual truth-seeker, the knower, is not enough — one must reach the scale of the whole knowing itself. Perhaps, this ultimate identity of subject and object can directly be called God, or it can be called the Absolute, the unconditioned truth which is not merely true relative to something else. This is Hegel’s answer. In light of the horrific catastrophe of modern life however, from the Holocaust to the capitalocene, this seems trite. Theodor Adorno’s slogan, that “The whole is the false,” seems more appropriate to the world we live in.

The critical dialectic of Marxism offers us a potential to redeem this desire for emancipatory approach premised on “lived experience” where it critiques the “truth” of this capitalist social totality. This dialectic teaches us to question intuition, since immediate experience often contains abstractions and mystifications. Yet, it also values that embodied intuition as a potential seed for transformation on a total scale. Marx spoke approvingly of the intuitive revolts of workers, saying of the 1844 uprising of Silesian weavers “[…]Not only are the machines, these rivals of the worker, destroyed, but also the ledgers, the property titles, and while all the other movements turned first only against the industrial baron, i.e. the visible enemy, this movement turned also against the banker, the hidden enemy[…]”

Here, Marx sees the working class as already recognizing the power of capital as transcending individuals, as something beyond just its embodiment in the boss. In this sense, the workers themselves, in their uprising itself, point through their practice to a theoretical point. In his words, “[…]the Silesian revolt by no means took place in the separation of thoughts from social principles.” As Raya Dunayevskaya has noted about his writing on the working class struggle to shorten the workday in Capital (1867), “[…]theory is not something the intellectual works out alone. Rather, the actions of the proletariat create the possibility for the intellectual to work out theory.” Rather than emancipatory truth being the social totality, or being the solipsistic and quantitative individual, Marx pointed towards the potential emancipatory whole embedded in the revolutionary actions of everyday life.

Revolution, or emancipation, must start from everyday life, but cannot become content with staying there. The notion of “emancipatory” solipsism is in truth a defense of the capitalist social totality — You are not revolutionary merely by existing. There is a revolutionary potential within our concrete, lived existences, but these existences in themselves are not revolution. We must reject both those pessimistic doctrines which speak of the “system” as independent of human action (whether it is the natural order or it is so entrenched that it may as well be so) and those which try to take the individual as a refuge from society, ignoring the historical and social mediation of every individual and their identities — including their very identity of being an individual! We are not inherently anything, and this becomes obvious when the attempt to strictly delineate “lanes” falls apart into incoherence.

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