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Ultimate ‘Reading Capital’ Post
Reading Capital by Louis Althusser:
Reading Capital Politically by Harry Cleaver:
Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One by Fredric Jameson:
Companion to Marx’s Capital by David Harvey:
Marx’s Capital, Philosophy and Political Economy by Geoff Pilling:
“To understand Capital, and therefore its first volume, it is necessary to take up ‘proletarian class positions’, i.e. to adopt the only viewpoint which makes visible the reality of the exploitation of wage labour power, which constitutes the whole of capitalism.
This is, proportionately speaking, on condition that they struggle against the influence of the burden of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology that they carry, relatively easy for workers. As ‘by nature’ they have a ‘class instinct’ formed by the harsh school of daily exploitation, all they need is a supplementary political and theoretical education in order to understand objectively what they feel subjectively, instinctively. Capital gives them this supplementary theoretical education in the form of objective explanations and proofs, which helps them to move from a proletarian class instinct to an (objective) proletarian class position.” (L. A.) (x)
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"Heinrich’s discussion of the oft used and oft misunderstood concept of fetishism is also superb. Heinrich stresses that fetishism is not a form of false consciousness, alienation or a theory about rampant consumption. Instead he points out that Marx’s theory of fetishism is a multi-faceted theory of ‘objective’ social domination in which commodities possess ‘spectral’ and ‘value-objectivity’ constituted by the reification of social relations in which things become personified and function as the bearers of value. Heinrich also points out that this process of fetishism also cultivates the naturalization and hypostatization of capitalist social relations. As Heinrich stresses these multi-faceted elements of the theory of fetishism do not simply consist in commodity fetishism but also apply to money and capital and reach their completion in the Trinity Formula."Chris O’Kane reviews Michael Heinrich’s An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. (via chemicalelements)
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"The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future."Karl Marx, Preface to the First Edition of Capital vol. I (via revjalen)
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I wonder if Baudrillard ever got any calls from advertising companies
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"A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-turning’ ever was."
Karl Marx - Capital vol. 1: Part 1: Chapter 1: Section 4: pg. 46
I’ll never look at a table the same way again…
(via uponthegears) -
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The second moment, also belonging to the 1980s, is that of Detroit Techno. This innovative music form is, I would argue, one of the most fascinating and most aesthetically successful instances of cybernetic accelerationism. Deliberately couched as a post-industrial Afro-futurism, it aimed to ‘erase the traces’ (Brecht) of the Fordist sound of Motown and to mimic the new robot production-lines that had displaced the remains of ‘variable capital’ (i.e. humans) for ‘constant capital’ (i.e. machines) at Ford. In this way it traced the mutating social space of Detroit – from the ‘white flight’ following the 1967 insurrection, the de-industrialisation that followed, and its own position in the suburban site of Belleville High, where Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson met. Mixing European influences (Kraftwerk, New Order, Depeche Mode, etc.) with the Detroit funk of Parliament / Funkadelic, the result was a singular form that defied the studied reflexes of postmodern collage for an integrated acceleration.
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The axes of Detroit Techno were an increase in speed (in bpm) from the previous forms of disco and House and a stripping-out of the humanist residues that often dominated those forms – not least the voice. The singularity of its aesthetic invention lay in this welcoming of the ‘mechanisation’, or better ‘computerisation’, of the aesthetic (which had obviously been prefigured by Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine and Computer World). The apotheosis of the form, at least as I regard it, is the work ‘It is what it is’ (1988), by Rhythim is Rhythim (aka Derrick May). This was, as one semi- ironic description went at the time, ‘dance music with bleeps’. Retaining funk, the insistence of Detroit Techno had the utopian, if not kitsch, elements of sci-fi futurism coupled to the dystopian fragmentation of the city-space (‘Night Drive Thru Babylon’, as the track by Model 500 had it). Again, the equivocations lay in a sense of abandonment: an escape to the future, escape from labour, or the loss of labour and the collapse of the future into permanent unemployment?Speed Machines - Ben Noys (via circulationwithinmyskull) -
"Thus we may say that surplus-value rests on a natural basis, but only in the very general sense that there is no natural obstacle absolutely preventing one man from lifting from himself the burden of the labour necessary to maintain his own existence, and imposing it on another, just as there is no unconquerable natural obstacle to the consumption of the flesh of one man by another."Capital. Karl Marx. Part 5: The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value. Chapter 16: Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value. (via rawlsianism-with-a-human-face)
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"For – to take a set of examples from Italian communist theory – if we take seriously the non-neutrality of productive assemblages (Panzieri), the structural and primary position of worker’s antagonism at the heart of the development of capital (Tronti), the impossibility of drawing a coherent line, in terms of the site of the production of value, between waged production and unwaged reproduction (Federici and Dalla Costa), the admixture of living and dead labor (late Bordiga), and if we take seriously that labor is a coercive process of the exploitation of the particular under the sign of the general, one that requires the violent paid and unpaid exploitation of humans and resources in the service of the construction and circulation of commodities, it follows that the entire built world of capital – buildings, furniture, highways, silverware, computers, wiring, painting, magazines, medicine, web pages, bullets, human bodies - is composed of actual, not metaphorical, crystallizations of congealed labor and, therefore, congealed hostility."
Dynamite at the police parade and other comic situations
About me
Towards an Apocalyptic Marxism ☭
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established , an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."----
The German Ideology, 1845
