Marx

But, I believe that most his thought was corrupted into some of the greatest evils of the 20th century. That's just my free market capitalist POV though. He seems too much of an idealist for my liking, Marxism just isn't practical, too dogmatic.

N.B. This isn't true.

Bill

Just to further the Nicky Wire imitations.

Marx's theories are all corrupted now, they were never clearly defined and as thus they were abused: even a clearly defined theory is going to be abused by those who see how to abuse it; one that is not laid out letter by letter is going to be abused even further. That's all I have to say about Marx.

I like Dr pepper.

oh, and I have grown a beard but it's more a lenin, not a marx one. but i have time to work on it.

oh and, marx is classic, obv.

engels did more than pay marx's bills?

Karl Marx, Capital, opened at random at Chapter 8, The Working Day

Oh but and Classic it is very sad the way academia treats marx today although I could just be getting a slanted picture of it all (fuck you Arts and Letters Daily! why isn't there a site just like you that isn't edited by a complete dickhead!?)

We have to restructure or the company will die!!

Marxism as political, social, and esthetic systems= dud.

Grimes in Los Angeles today.

Photography by Jvshvisions pic.twitter.com/b2kemGSYhU

— GRIMES CHARTS (@GrimezszCharts) October 2, 2021

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

— james hennessy (@jrhennessy) October 3, 2021

thats right

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

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

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

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

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

I could never be a blood donor, too squeamish

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

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

in the current LRB adam tooze writes

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

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

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

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

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

- Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

hell yes that’s the stuff

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

Reads like a bad parody of 19th century triumphalism.

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

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

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

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

That reading has its own naivities too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That doesn’t seem like a very good guide tho

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

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

new board description lol

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

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

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

oh yeah duh.

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

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

― Tracer Hand

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

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

Are the “marxist equity programs” actually Marxist?

Are the “marxist equity programs” actually Marxist?

and can I extract my Marxist equity during my lifetime using a Marxist reverse mortgage?

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

― Tracer Hand, Sunday, 26 January 2025 15:17 (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

like on some level tooze can’t be wrong. it’s tautologically true that, if the whole world snapped into unison tomorrow and delivered a loud clear democratic demand for forceful action on climate, and policy makers listened, we’d figure shit out

but it doesn’t feel like a good diagnosis of where things are at, and where climate progress is likely to come from at (to use one of tooze’s favorite phrases) The Current Impasse 😎

sadly, democratic will is often against doing anything (in canada our carbon tax is deeply unpopular and repealing it now has tripartisan support), deployment of clean energy infrastructure is running up against the “small-c” conservation strain of the environmental movement that use nimby-like tactics to delay or block development of solar in places like california, and to a large extent the future global carbon emissions path isnt about how far rich western countries decarbonize, but what energy mix countries like china and india will pursue. its still good to democratically agitate for climate action, but as a matter of global political economy i think he’s kind of lost the plot

I'm not sure Tooze meant a democratic process. Not really sure what he meant. This is kind of suggestive but vague:

It doesn’t require unanimity or consensus. It doesn’t require that no one is left behind. What it does require is a powerful coalition to impose its will, to make history in the most radical sense.

It sounds more like Marxist cosplay than a workable roadmap.

The burger reveals that there are two types of people, in the end: First are those who believe that a technologically complex society is impossible without these horrors or, at the very least, without the continual threat of starvation imposed by the artificial scarcity of basic necessities. In other words, they earnestly believe that people will not work at all unless compelled to on threat of death, and that this alone justifies social domination as the necessary stimulus for the creation of any social surplus whatsoever. Second are those who know that the entire history of humanity demonstrates the exact opposite to be true—that domination is not a necessity but is instead a vast and violent social ritual imposed on people by people and that it can therefore also be overthrown by people. The rule of the burger is, in the end, just as natural or necessary as the divine right of kings. In other words, a technologically complex society capable of producing material abundance (in fact, luxury) for all is perfectly possible and it can be administered deliberatively by all the members of this society without threatening the majority of the world’s population with starvation, and without subjecting millions across the planet to medieval horrors in order to secure the comfort of a chosen few. Moreover, all of this can be done with less energy than we use now, with a smaller material footprint, and on less land put to better use rehabilitating the metabolism of the human species with its environment.19 But creating such a future requires first recognizing that the point of social struggle is not to work for the burger, to eat the burger, to strike to increase the labor share of income and guarantee more burgers for more workers, or even to seize all the burgers and place them under the control of the workers. The point is to unmake the very way that the burger itself is made. And this future can only be secured through a protracted war waged against the hamburger as it currently exists, against its defenders, and against its false critics.

https://brooklynrail.org/2025/02/field-notes/quarter-pounds-of-flesh-2/

Too many burgers in this piece but the goal has always been the above.

I got some impossible chicken nuggets the other day and they were pretty good!

a technologically complex society capable of producing material abundance (in fact, luxury) for all is perfectly possible and it can be administered deliberatively by all the members of this society

First half of that is demonstrably true. It's the second half where everything tends to fall to the ground.

On the new translation:

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/karl-marx-capital-new-translation/

Phil Neel writes good stuff

Yeah, it was an excellent piece

https://i.ibb.co/3YR139MM/Screenshot-2025-08-16-at-21-15-39.png

Recent appearance in Macuspana, Tabasco

zapatistas past and present in that mural, thats rad

https://www.google.com/maps/@17.7526091,-92.5896344,3a,75y,308.45h,79.45t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sbUAWM_73P8fiXn63g1qNfg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D10.551180212762446%26panoid%3DbUAWM_73P8fiXn63g1qNfg%26yaw%3D308.45181178258775!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDgxMy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

The whole street is a mural extravaganza

funny this popped up...doing a first read through of Capital now, after finishing the Grundrisse a few months ago (yes I read the Grundrisse first for some reason).

While looking up replacement brushes for my Philips Sonicare electric toothbrush I decided to look up the history of the Philips company as I've always wondered why a Dutch company appears to have an English name. I didn't find that out but instead found out that the father of the founder of the company was a first cousin of Karl Marx and that his grandfather, Lion Philips, was a major financial supporter of Marx and a close friend of his.

ryan, are you reading the new translation?

Yes I am! Never read the old penguin one but I have it. Some chapters are in a slightly different order apparently as well—since they are going off the second German edition. Taking a pause after chapter 5 and reading a bit of David Harvey’s Companion to Capital.

nice. been wondering about the new translation. I read about half of the penguin and stalled out (was part of a three-person reading group that fell apart) and have been pondering picking up the new one as a means to re-start. I liked the Harvey quite a bit though my real-deal marxist scholar friend has some problem with him that I do not fully understand