ive just posted a crowdfund campaign for the first full english translation of marx's "reworking manuscript" (Ergänzungen und Veränderungen zum ersten Band des Kapitals)
excerpts of the text have been recently translated for an appendix in michael heinrich's How to Read Karl Marx's Capital which came out last year from monthly review, but this would be the first full english translation of a manuscript which, in the MEGA, totals about 50 pages
piggybacking off my ask about abolishing value: if value is historically specific, but money/commodities have existed earlier, then how were people in antiquity/the middle ages able to compare the "worth" of different commodities? you're saying we wouldn't be able to do that in communism, but because people were able to do it in precapitalist societies, it seems value isn't a necessary condition for that kind of accounting being possible? then what is?
the argument is that these exchanges were based on different social arrangements so that pre-capitalist societies did not have a value-logic at all, even if they had the buying and selling of goods. "worth" in these societies was not a purely economic notion in the way that it becomes in a world of generalized commodity exchange. there's a reason that people debated for centuries about how to price things justly, based on tradition/custom/power/etc rather than economic principles alone. it's this isolation of 'the economic' as operating in accordance with its own internal logic that represents the shift toward value-relationships which i think characterizes capitalism.
so when marx asks 'why does labor take the form of value', we can read the question as asking why a transhistorical physiological function (labor-as-such) begets this historically specific property (value), but also/inversely, why does this peculiar social object (labor in the one-sided economic sense) somehow posit an objective regulatory mechanism which structures/aggregates our own subjective estimation of things (based on notions of sentiment, tradition, etc which become outmoded or subsumed by capital but are not essential to it). if you only ever read the question in the first way, then you'll get hung up on the mere existence of pre-capitalist exchange and also potentially project value-constituting labor back onto all of history because it's reduced to a purely physiological act, devoid of a social context/content.
would i like the first 3 TES games if i didn't like the last 2?
you've got bad taste if you don't like oblivion and skyrim BUT. maybe you'd like the others, especially if you want stronger RPG elements. arena and daggerfall are also very different from everything since morrowind, so there's that
why do people start stupid discourse over bananas?
when a do-nothing communist becomes a do-something communist, this is the "something"
turning all the lights off & booting up animal crossing new leaf just to make my little guy sit in the aquarium while i weep into my 3ds
What do you like better about Oblivion than Morrowind out of curiosity
a big part of it is simply that it was my first tes game tbh. the lore in morrowind is more fun and the environments are cool, but i think oblivion quests are *mostly* superior. especially the guilds. some other reasons probably if i really had to think about it
Gramsci - any good?
ive never touched gramsci but havent gotten the impression ive missed all that much, aside from how often his name gets dragged out
what exactly is a law? heinrich says at the end of his intro "That one can speak of communism when ... the state [has been abolished] does not mean that such a society would have no rules." forgive me for i have not read my pashukanis [yet], but i'm not totally sure what stateless rules would look like, how they would be enforced (presumably without police), or why these arent the same thing as laws. like what exactly does the absence of the state mean for day-to-day life?
i'm not a blueprint-doer but i imagine it'd be more like rules of a game or obligations etc rather than a set legal code. we shouldn't need the state to believe that killing your neighbor is a social wrong etc. and how we respond to those social wrongs doesn't need to take the form of a transaction where the punishment is the cost of committing the crime
Obligatory Mass Effect question: Who are you gonna bang?
i didn't go into the game caring about this question all that much but then i googled my options and saw jack, so
commodities? historically specific. money? historically specific. the state? historically specific. labor? historically specific. the general laws of history? historically specific.
probably the easiest way to get where i'm coming from on any particular issue is to accept that i probably think it's historically specific
i have a bit of trouble feeling confident i understand vft, i've read heinrich's intro and some other stuff but i still feel like it goes over my head. hopefully you can help by eli5. from what i understand, the implication seems to be that we wouldnt even be able to psychologically process things in terms of value, like it wouldnt even occur to us to exchange things, items/services wouldnt appear in our heads with an economic "worth" attached to them, contra what smith/economists claim?
to quibble a bit: that's not "the" implication (there are several) and i don't think this is exclusive to "VFT" necessarily (whatever that means, i think it's too vague to refer to anything too specific), but it's definitely part of the analysis which i think comes out of heinrich's rendering of marx (et al). on this particular point, i think postone is probably even more forcefully explicit about the historical specificity of capitalist society/how we operate within it, which compliments heinrich well enough. id also probably recommend the sam chambers book ('there's no such thing as the economy') which makes a decent case for this as well by attempting to read marx as a genealogist.
why are you not a mauist?
he offers a fairly clever marxist account but im just not convinced by the framing/assumptions. there are some theoretical moves i find questionable for various reasons, especially when it comes to conceding too much to anthropologism etc, which is just uninteresting to me as an outlet for some of these issues
do you have any opinions on that mau post? the "the private sector" section made me raise eyebrows
he's a nice guy but im simply not a mauist
