mikema63 wrote:I'm going to just do some general thoughts here.
My main point is that the relationship you have with your labor is abstract in any case. Marx is offering up a difference that doesn't really matter one way or another in any apparently fundamental way here except that the feelings of the laborer towards their labor is impacted.
Arguments that different methods of labor would be better in various ways, or have better outcomes, or better power dynamics, or whatever else I get but this vague concept of abstract alienation from an abstract relationship between a laborer, labor, commodity, and consumer within the framework of our abstract relationship to society at large simply is to "philosophical" (for lack of a better word to describe my sense of it) to be compelling.
I feel the same way about this that I do reading the allegory of the cave or some such airy speculation about forms or whatever, it seems to be speculation past a point I'm willing to follow without supporting evidence.
The reason I have to reduce it to peoples actual feelings about stuff is that beyond that it simply doesn't matter to me, anymore than it would matter to me if there was a perfect abstract form for labor that we are all failing to live up to.
Then, I don't think I can be compelling because Marx whilst able to be highly abstract is also rather concrete, he moves between the two and ends up with '
concrete abstractions'.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/abstraction-abstract-labor-and-ilyenkov/If we are free to select one general feature over another we can radically change the concept of capital. If we choose only the ahistorical features we can make capital seem eternal. If abstraction is just seen as the identification of general features then we have no choice but to be arbitrary in our abstractions. But if abstraction is seen differently, as identifying the essential nature of an object, as identifying the “relation within which this thing is this thing” as Ilenkov puts it, then we can be scientific about our abstractions. When we make an abstraction we want to select that aspect of the object which identifies its essence. Since the essence of things is in their relation to other things, we want to identify the essential relations which govern the object, abstracting away other non-essential aspects.
It is through this that Marx is able to identify that the universal/essence of human nature is through labor, that all the particularities of human history are underpinned by labor.
To which some handy resources to see the criticism of 'old logic' and how Marx, as influenced by Hegelianism moves past its limitations.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/universal.htmhttp://69.195.124.91/~brucieba/2014/04/16/ilyenkovs-dialectic-of-the-abstract-and-the-concrete-ii/https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra1e.htmWhere as you seem to posit his view as superfluous and on equal terms with any abstraction (Plato's cave) where as from my understanding the great boon of Marx's means is that it isn't one sidedly abstract of empirical, as he rejects the duality.
Marx starts from the real existing world in it's chaotic form and seeks to investigate it in such a way as to identify essential relations, abstracting from them the inessential, he is able to identify real world relations dubbed as 'concrete abstractions'.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#loc3If I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.
The fact that everyone abstracts is no basis on which to reject anything and I think merely avoids finding the distinctions between abstractions in making them equally absurd based on being abstractions rather than exploring what distinguishes one abstraction as more valid from another.
It seems as if you reject the sense in which alienation isn't a property strictly of the mind, but of reality.
And that you reduce it to feelings and seemingly superfluos makes me think you're limited by the same things as the British empiricists.
http://69.195.124.91/~brucieba/2014/04/13/ilyenkovs-dialectic-of-the-abstract-and-the-concrete-i/I strongly suspect your philosophical assumptions entail the same 'silly' materialism from that day and age.
https://www.marxists.org/subject/marxmyths/jordan/article2.htmThis may not encompass your view entirely, but I do think it reasonable enough to boldly assert such overlap so you can react to this assertion, see how much of yourself you see within British empiricism the implications from it. I would suggest inquiring into the distinction between form and content and how the two are actually inseparable (
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling2.htm#Pill2), which I suspect overlaps with the British empiricist vs Continental rationalist debates/divide.
I quite like the existentialists, it ties into my worldview pretty well generally.
They have some interesting work but I worry that their solution to a sense of meaninglessness doesn't effectively resolve the issue. Though they were also a product of their times as much as their conditions.
The issue here is that power in this sense doesn't come from an individual it comes from us collectively. We didn't forget that money has power it has power because society does, but this too is an abstraction. If we all stopped "imbuing" society with power it would collapse, but we can't and it wont because we are fundamentally social animals constrained by our own biology and psychology.
We aren't rational creatures tricked into fetishisticly imbuing power onto object, we are irrational animals who survive by collectively hallucinating meaning and order on a pointless existence and universe.
Society wouldn't collapse if people come to disbelieve, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
It's a necessarily step but removing people's sense of value inherent within an object itself rather than constituted by social relations, would not suffice. It wouldn't collapse society, if only it were so easy to tear back the ideological veil and boom, problem solved. Except that part is just an obscurity but the obscurity has a very real existence, money does have value, just not inherently within itself. It is maintained no matter your beliefs as our beliefs do not constitute the nature of reality, as that reality of money's value is maintained objectively. I think your sense of the universe as meaningless, which in some sense I could agree with as reality is indifferent to us, but the alienation that prevails most intensely under capitalism isn't something inherent to reality but historically particular. Of course we are required to insert meaning but its very real, just as an alienated god was very real during feudalism. The task though is that if one overcomes capitalism and its alienated forms of labor, we would presumably have actually overcome alienation and made things directly conscious. Religion nor commodities would be imbued with many characteristics that obscure the real relations of people. The market directs out societies as opposed to us directing them, it isn't saying one can't rationally be aware of the relations between people, but that the real relations of peoples are necessarily obscured in our actual functioning of society.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/the-law-of-value-2-the-fetishism-of-commodities/Now let’s look outside the workplace at the market. In the market things are different. The organization of work, the division of labor, doesn’t happen through direct social relations between people. In the market the products of labor confront each other as commodities with values. These interactions between things act back upon production. They are what send signals to producers to change their labor, to produce more, produce less, go out of business, expand business, etc.
Coal miners, bakers, carpenters and chefs don’t directly relate to each other as workers. Instead the products of their labor, coal, bread, cabinets and pasta, meet in the market and are exchanged with one another. The material relations between people become social relations between things. When we look at coal, bread, cabinets and pasta we don’t see the work that created them. We just see commodities standing in relation of value to each other. A pile of coal’s value is worth so many loaves of bread. A cabinet’s value is worth so much pasta. The value, the social power of the object, appears to be a property of the object itself, not a result of the relation between workers.
...
We are atomized individuals wandering through a world of objects that we consume. When we buy a commodity we are just having an experience between ourselves and the commodity. We are blind to the social relations behind these interactions. Even if we consciously know that there is a network of social relations being coordinated through this world of commodities, we have no way of experiencing these relations directly because… they are not direct relations. We can only have an isolated intellectual knowledge of these social relations, not a direct relation. Every economic relation is mediated by an object called a commodity.
This process whereby the social relations between people take the form of relations between things Marx calls “reification”. Reification helps explain why it is that in a capitalist society things appear to take on the characteristics of people. Inanimate objects spring to life endowed with a “value” that seems to come from the object itself. We say a book is worth 20 dollars, a sweater worth 25 dollars. But this value doesn’t come from the sweater itself. You can’t cut open the sweater and find $25 inside. This $25 is an expression of the relation between this sweater and all of the other commodities in the market. And these commodities are just the material forms of a social labor process coordinated through market exchange. It is because people organize their labor through the market that value exists.
The illusion that value comes from the commodity itself and not from the social relations behind it is a “fetish”. A capitalist society is full of such illusions. Money appears to have god-like qualities, yet this is only so because it is an object which is used to express the value of all other commodities. Profit appears to spring out of exchange itself, yet Marx worked hard to explain how profit actually originates in production through the unequal relations between capital and labor in the workplace. Rent appears to grow out of the soil, yet Marx was adamant that rent actually comes from the appropriation of value created by labor. We see these fetishistic ideas in modern day mainstream economic theory in the idea that value comes from the subjective experience between a consumer and a commodity, and that capital creates value by itself.
https://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/marxism/modules/marxfetishism.htmlOur very notions of how our society runs is a testament to the maintenance of the illusion, which even in being explained doesn't disturb it in the slightest, the system and society still go on because it requires action to change the state of the world, not belief and contemplation.
As you might see in the above quote, the idea that the value of things is subjective is part of the idea of commodity fetishism. Which now that i think about it might explain why you seem to think society is so precarious, that if we didn't hallucinate the value the system would collapse. Except that value of objects isn't determined by subjective valuing of things and you would be good to look at Marxist critiques of economics to see how they make the abstract idealizations to hide the reality of capitalist relations and it's function.
The criticism being not for the use of abstractions but keeping them at the level of being highly abstract and not brought back into real world relations and also idealizations in presupposing things that are informed by real world relations but in a way that universalizes the particulars of a person under capitalism.
Actually, skip all this, I make another recommendation to read that Simon Clarke book.
Here's a summary of it:
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/marginal-futility-reflections-on-simon-clarkes-marx-marginalism-and-modern-sociology/But might need to do some background stuff to get familiar with some of the assumptions/beliefs of Marxists.
Society is and will always be larger than any person. Communism doesn't solve this. No matter how we organize production everyone will always feel like they are a cog in a vast an innexplicable system because we are all cogs in our vast shared hallucinations about reality.
It is bigger than any one person, but size isn't the problem.
And perhaps your sense of hopelessness of changing things might be based on the pessimism of the failed Russian revolution.
http://libcom.org/files/marx,%20marginalism%20and%20modern%20sociology%20-%20clarke.pdfHowever socialism, far from resolving the contradiction between the formal rationality and the substantive irrationality of modern society, threatens to develop this contradiction to its ultimate limits in supplanting the dominance of economic rationality by the dominance of bureaucratic rationality, sacrificing the economic rationality and relative political freedom of capitalism for the ultimate nightmare of a totalitarian bureaucratic tyranny
This being a summary of the socialist countries of the 20th century that didn't resolve alienation of labor and in practiced treated the issue as one of simply political change rather than a fundamentally economic one. Which was in part due to the backwardness of such countries and the failure to realize 'permanent revolution' across Europe.
That's what we are fundamentally though. A human being stripped of all the abstraction we and society imbue ourselves with are just animals getting by and procreating because the historical forces of earth caused replicating chemical reactions to start having delusions of grandeur. Capitalism, communism, socialism, fuedalism, tribalism, and whatever else are just systems of abstractions we've layered onto the bare truth of what we are. Disposable Somatic cells protecting our reproductive bits.
Such reductionism, I think I really was on the money with the point about british empiricism and likely 'silly' materialism. Really Mike, have another Crack at Marx, it might be good for your psychological well being because this is just depressing to read
Because human nature isn't reducible to biological processes, what is neglected in this is what is picked up by active idealism. What is largely ignored is the social consciousness of humans that distinguishes them from an animal, one in which the contents is formed in conjunction with society.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htmMarxism isn't reductionistic, and earlier I linked something where a fella goes on about Marx's Naturalism to exemplify how whilst Marx mentions being a materialist, is wasn't in the sense of many other materialist thinkers. And it might help offer the alternative perspective that is novel to the materialist vs idealist divide. Superior I believe.
One is unable to explain society if one resorted to describing biological mechanisms and speculated their correlation to observed activity. And such to say something comparable to say, love is just chemical reactions is to necessarily simply ignore observations and restrict what one considers the truth of things to a scale that is unable to explain the observable complexity of human society.
Sure there is biological drives, but man is not simply his drives, his drives are mediated socially and through his consciousness. But if humanity is to be reduced to the state of mere biological animal, then I guess it is difficult to see much of the poverty not just in basic needs but in ideas of human flourishing in the ideal of people cultivating themselves through an education of liberal arts or something.
We aren't ruled by commodities, we are ruled by society. Society in one case imbues commodities and production with a certain value. Societies in another case imbue power onto the aristocracy. In another onto the bureaucracy. Onto another the syndicate.
We are always ruled by our relationship with the rest of society which is mediated through our economies and access to material goods yes, but by no means is some shift in our methods of production and allocation of resources represent conscious control over commodities. We are all still caught in the web of control of society regardless.
Indeed, no single individual has such immense control but its also the case that we are being directed by markets in a way that is antagonistic to humans and they actual wants and this is treated a force of nature itself rather than something we can intervene in and change. The conscious part being that collectively humans can direct their labor and products to desired ends, rather than having humans directed by commodities and profitable ends irregardless of its consequences.
It is society that is beholden the the economy more than the economy to society, the evidence being the entire history of capitalism displacing all ways for its profit seeking.
Society couldn't with stand a strong capitalist class which then in its pursuit of profit largely transformed society to one defined by its market relations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Transformation_(book)Though I get from your perspective since value is simply subjective that its not markets that dictate.
Use value is just as abstract a thing as exchange value. Someone or some group of people say what use value is, it doesn't exist outside of society. It's contingent on a bunch of different socially valued things in the web of values and abstractions created by society with no clear beginning or end. Unless everything is reduced to the ends of our bare human subsistence as animals there is nothing to hinge use value on that makes it compellingly more or less real than exchange value. Indeed even then there isn't really any fundamental reason for our continued existence to be a value except that we irrationally want it because we just do.
Indeed, the use-value of a thing doesn't exist outside of society but I don't get this claim of mere abstractino, it sounds as if you would render all thought simply meaningless which would mean you have nothing to say because its all just abstraction.
But regardless of what you do or don't believe, a hammer isn't useless because the concept of use value exists a a concept. Which I think again, your sense of it just being an abstraction seems to be an emphasis on empirical entities as real and true things and not seeing how certain abstractions can correspond to real things about reality even if they don't have a referent in terms of an empirical object.
I imagine the difference again being an emphasis on relations between things in the real world.
http://eesenor.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/capitalism-marxism-nominalism.htmlNow, Capitalism is plainly a Nominalist system, in which any group is no more than an association of members. But, despite its focus on groups, especially on Class, Marxism never abandons Nominalism, distinguished from Capitalism by conceiving individuals as related dialectically, rather than associatively.
Except what is valued doesn't emerge from nothing, but from the real world and it's relation. But before can get to that, would need to go through the task of seeing the materiality of consciousness.
https://isfp.co.uk/russian_thinkers/evald_ilyenkov.htmland the matter of how activity mediates the a passive materialism and active idealism to get the sense of how man transforms the world and is transformed by it also.
perhaps another Ilyenov would be good in his criticism of abstract labor for education not sufficing when a real concrete activity is required to learn about things, not their representations that lack their real world qualities.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/activity/index.htmNothing matters to humanity except what we pretend matters. We are animals compelled by the uncaring and unforgiving blind drive of biology beyond our control. Forever.
Your view of humans is in poverty Mikey, humans whilst clearly being natural beings aren't reducible to that of animals for the reality of our consciousness. Which I think is perplexing to the materialism and empiricism I speculate in your world view.
Which is why...
It's subjectivity all the way down.
You need to get into some Marxist philosophy Mikey.
I suspect it might yet be the means for you to see the holy gospel of Marx
Senter wrote:I don't feel this applies today. First, co-ops today are not trading for other goods, and they are not trying to float their own "currency". They utilize the money/currency of their nation as any business does. But they are organized very differently to eliminate a profit motive. Members each typically own one share of company stock, and only one share. No one but members may own shares and those shares entitle the member to one vote per issue voted on. Shares are not marketable to the public but are bought and sold with the company, itself, being one of the two in the transaction. And as to size, review the many articles and videos available on Mondragon. One video shows their cutting-edge high tech solar panel manufacturing process. They are big enough to have their own university and their own bank and are the 7th largest business in Spain. So size need not be a problem.
Just where do you think the profit motive is derived? Because I worry that you think there is just some inherent greed in capitalists rather than it being a necessity of markets to pursue profit less a company go under.
Companies like Mondragon are cool and all but I don't see how a co-op disrupts the law of value and somehow has them exist outside the same market forces that compel capitalists to seek profit and be competitive.
To get where I'm coming from, this might help.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/falling-rate-of-profit/ which if you don't share the same beliefs then it's understandable then why we might disagree in regards to the implications of co-ops leading to socialism.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics