ΔM, that is. The difference between M’ and M. As in M-C-M’, the circuit which Marx identifies with capital (the circuit of money as capital).
The difference is surplus value, which is really what I’m on about. M-C-M’ is really M-C(mp+lp)…P…C’-M’ where mp=means of production and lp=labor power and …P… indicates production. Which is to say, the capitalist, our man Moneybags, makes an initial outlay for means of production (say, buildings and tools/machinery and raw materials) and for labor power (workers), which are then combined to produce a new product which is then sold for an amount greater than Moneybags’ outlay for mp and lp. The difference between the outlay and take home is the profit or surplus value (for now we’ll say profit and surplus value are the same; we’re also going to leave aside accumulation for now and just assume it happens normally).
Let’s say Moneybags spends $1000 and makes $1500. Let’s say annually. In that case the change in M is $500. Moneybags spends $500 on means of production and $500 on labor power (hiring ten workers for the year) and makes $500 over and above his costs. So far so good, right? All good and Marxly? Well, hold on a sec.
I’ve been reading about slavery recently, as the last few posts on here indicate. I’ve also been skimming the exchange between Le Colonel Chabert and Le Mikel Beggsert in the comments section of this post (wish I had the time and energy and sleep etc to really follow it closely and participate - one of these days I’ll catch up), which is in part about what value and surplus value is, who produces it. As I’ve understood it anyway - perhaps wrongly - slavery wasn’t productive of surplus value. (The difference between M and M’ is the difference between the value workers add to the finished product and what those workers are paid in wages.) I’m not sure that Mike meant that or not, but it’s related to how I read his remark from the discussion I linked to:
A major part of Marx’s project in Capital and elsewhere is to show how the system of exchange of equal values can maintain a structure of exploitation and surplus labour. Thus ’surplus value’. That doesn’t mean necessarily that surplus value accounts for the totality of exploitation in a capitalist society. But I think we can talk about that without needing to confuse it with the system of value.
A problem is that it is impossible to quantify non-value exploitation because there is no money/exchange/competition relationship that can be said to homogenise non-value-productive labour-time in the way value-productive labour-time is. But of course the same thing applies to slave or feudal exploitation - it cannot be quantified - but we wouldnt’ say it didn’t exist.
It strikes me that Mike is wrong (and I’ve been wrong) about the point on slavery. Slavery can be (surplus) value productive and can fit into the circuit M-C-M’.
Back to Moneybags: S Moneybags the slave owner and his cousin W Moneybags both spend $1000 a year to get a product they then sell for $1500.
W hires ten workers, pays them $50 each for the year, and pays $500 for tools and building and upkeep and raw materials. W does this for 20 years.
S purchases 10 slaves for $500 a year, having reasonable evidence that the average working life for his purchased slaves will be 20 years for an average cost of $25 per slave per year they are able to work. He also pays for their means of subsistence (food, housing, medicine, etc, all the things that W’s workers provide for themselves [S’s slaves provide some of these things for themselves too but S isn’t always aware of that]) at an average of $25 per year, which added to the purchase price of the slave makes for $50 a year per slave or $500 a year for labor power. S also pays $500 a year for tools and building and upkeep and raw materials as does W.
It seems to me that in both cases W and S Moneybags each perform the circuit M-C-M’ - laying out $1000 (consisting in $500 for purchase of means of subsistence and $500 to purchase labor power) in order to get a product which they then sell for $1500 - once per year for 20 years. How is S not producing surplus value? And how are S’s laborers not measurably exploited while W’s are? (Mike had said that slave exploitation wasn’t quantifiable.) (Where ‘exploit’ means ‘to extract surplus value or surplus labor from’.) It doesn’t seem to me that the absence of wages makes a difference here as to whether or not surplus value is produced.
On a slightly related note, from Tom Downey Planting a Capitalist South, Downey writes of mills and a factory in Vaucluse, South Carolina, the proprietors of which used to slaves
“to fill their labor requirements. In 1836 almost half of the factory’s operatives were slaves, who could be found at work in every department except weaving, where “whites are said to have the advantage” besides being “equally cheap.” Some operatives were hired from neighboring slaveholders. Edgefield farmer Lark Swearingen leased one of his slaves, Letty, to John Bauskett at Vaucluse for $100 per annum, besides selling cotton and fodder to the factory. But most slave operatives came to Vaucluse from the factory’s owners, who angled to further profit from their manufacturing investment by supplying Vaucluse with a portion of its labor. Paul Fitzsimons hired out slaves to Vaucluse, as did George MacDufffie, who employed at least five of his younger male and female slaves at Vaucluse as well as a carpenter, Jesse, and his wife. In return, MacDuffie sought a total of $1000 in annual wages. Likewise, John Bauskett transferred several hands from his plantation to work at Vaucluse. By 1840, Bauskett employed almost one-fourth of his own slaves (27 of 112) in his cotton mill, while a visitor asserted that all the slaves working in the mill belonged to the factory’s proprietors.” (126.)
In this example, Bauskett did with his 26 slaves what I called S Moneybags. In the interaction between Bauskett, Swearingen, and Letty, Bauskett is like W Moneybags - he hires a worker and pays that worker wages. It makes no difference to Bauskett/W Moneybags if those wages are paid to the worker (Letty) or to someone else (in this case, Swearingen). In chapter ten of v1 of Capital, Marx writes of workers “selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death.” Arguably, the slavery here is metaphorical for Marx - waged slaves are not literally slaves. Perhaps. But what about the families? The workers in this quote are presumably men, but even if not they are likely adults. Some of those men and maybe women end up selling their children into the factory. Marx quotes a Mr. Charles Parsons who writes in a letter that his “indignation has been aroused again and again at the sight of poor children whose health has been sacrificed to gratify the avarice of either parents or employers.” Parsons’ indignation is over parents who send their children into factories for the wages those children will earn, something closer to slavery than the condition of the adult workers. (In the context of discussing child labor in this chapter Marx writes “The “House of Terror” for paupers” - I believe this a Bentham reference but I’ll have to double check - “of which the capitalistic soul of 1770 only dreamed, was realised a few years later in the shape of a gigantic “Workhouse” for the industrial worker himself. It is called the Factory.” The factory as workhouse is precisely a claim that “free” labor is involuntary labor.
Marx adds that at the time of his writing “in most processes of production the co-operation of the children, young persons, and women is indispensable.” And “One set of masters, this time as before, secured to itself special seigneurial rights over the children of the proletariat. These were the silk manufacturers.”
In the chapter on machinery, ch15, Marx writes that
“In some branches of the woollen manufacture in England the employment of children has during recent years been considerably diminished, and in some cases has been entirely abolished. Why? Because the Factory Acts made two sets of children necessary, one working six hours, the other four, or each working five hours. But the parents refused to sell the “half-timers” cheaper than the “full-timers.” (…) Machinery also revolutionises out and out the contract between the labourer and the capitalist, which formally fixes their mutual relations. Taking the exchange of commodities as our basis, our first assumption was that capitalist and labourer met as free persons, as independent owners of commodities; the one possessing money and means of production, the other labour-power. But now the capitalist buys children and young persons under age. Previously, the workman sold his own labour-power, which he disposed of nominally as a free agent. Now he sells wife and child. He has become a slave-dealer. The demand for children’s labour often resembles in form the inquiries for negro slaves, such as were formerly to be read among the advertisements in American journals.“My attention,” says an English factory inspector, “was drawn to an advertisement in the local paper of one of the most important manufacturing towns of my district, of which the following is a copy: Wanted, 12 to 20 young persons, not younger than what can pass for 13 years. Wages, 4 shillings a week. Apply &c.”
The phrase “what can pass for 13 years,” has reference to the fact, that by the Factory Act, children under 13 years may work only 6 hours. A surgeon officially appointed must certify their age. The manufacturer, therefore, asks for children who look as if they we’re already 13 years old. The decrease, often by leaps and bounds in the number of children under 13 years employed in factories, a decrease that is shown in an astonishing manner by the English statistics of the last 20 years, was for the most part, according to the evidence of the factory inspectors themselves, the work of the certifying surgeons, who overstated the age of the children, agreeably to the capitalist’s greed for exploitation, and the sordid trafficking needs of the parents. (…) In spite of legislation, the number of boys sold in Great Britain by their parents to act as live chimney-sweeping machines (although there exist plenty of machines to replace them) exceeds 2,000. (…) Whenever the law limits the labour of children to 6 hours in industries not before interfered with, the complaints of the manufacturers are always renewed. They allege that numbers of the parents withdraw their children from the industry brought under the Act, in order to sell them where “freedom of labour” still rules, i.e., where children under 13 years are compelled to work like grown-up people, and therefore can be got rid of at a higher price. “
Arguably, at least for some marxists, the condition Marx is discussing here with child labor and all that might be considered an immature capitalism - capitalism which has not yet come into its own because the lack of restraint (from class conflict and labor law - itself a product or compromise derived from class conflict) has not yet pushed capital to maximize relative surplus value instead of absolute surplus value. I’m not convinced of that, but in any case that’s not the point. Even conceding for the sake of argument this periodization, the immature capitalism which exploits children and so on is still a capital relation, which means surplus value exists. In the cases of women and children, it’s not at all clear to me that there’s a tremendous difference in kind between the sale of their labor power and the sale of Letty’s labor power by Swearingen, in the sense that value production occurs even when the purchase price of that labor power (in this case, a wage) is paid to someone other than the laborer - that is, when the labor power purchased does not legally belong to the person whose body is the container for that labor power (because children and married women at this time, like slaves, were not self-owners).
2064.
Comment by Nate — November 16, 2007 @ 1:51 am
Also, so I don’t forget, a quote from a post over at Mike Beggs’ blog (http://scandalum.wordpress.com/2007/11/16/on-value/ ), filed here in the hopes to make it a bit more likely I’ll remember it:
“A definition of economics which, however disturbing to economists, would contain a great deal of truth would be ‘The study of collections of essentially diverse objects as though these collections were always quantifiable by one constant unit’. Economics is inherently and essentially imprecise. The only question is how heroic we are prepared to be, or what choice we make between simplification of the type of the Crusoe economy, where most major problems of reality are assumed away and arguments about the remainder can be logically impeccable, and simplifications of the Keynesian and Harrodian type where the need for rough-and-ready quantification is accepted. Any principle for quantifying collections of essentially (i.e. relevantly) diverse things must amount to valuation.”
- G. L. S. Shackle [1967]: The Years of High Theory: Invention and tradition in economic thought, 1926-39, p. 255
Comment by Nate — November 16, 2007 @ 1:58 am
Hey Nate,
I saw this just before heading home for the weekend and I don’t have good computer access at home right now because people are sleeping in the office… so just to respond briefly…
Your example seems to be slavery in a fully commodity producing + exchanging society. All the elements of the slave’s subsistence and product are valuable on the market, and that’s why surplus is also surplus value in that case and quantifiable only because exchangeable. I think I was talking about the case where the exploited’s product and/or subsistence were not marketed and therefore not valued. eg. much ancient slavery, or much peasant exploitation in medieval Europe (though feudal exploitation did develop commodity elements).
Comment by Mike Beggs — November 16, 2007 @ 2:13 am
hi Mike,
Sure thing, and so it’s clear - I wasn’t trying to take a comment made in passing of yours and turn it into a representative of a fully worked out thought on your part, I was really just using it to think my way through to something - I’d never really put it together in my head before how slave societies like those in the U.S. could be capitalist though I’d been amenable to the idea. That’s the bit I’m working out for myself here. Have a good weekend.
take care,
Nate
ps- the marketable/exchange-able bit, I’m going to be posting soon-ish on that, I’ve just read some really interesting things on slaves attempts to use their value - their knowledge of their value - to their (slight) advantage, like trying to argue that they’re a real bargain and so on in slave markets, in attempts to keep their families together. It’s really horrible stuff but it’s also really interesting.
Comment by Nate — November 16, 2007 @ 2:48 am
Nate - One way into this is to ask what the principal “cash value” is - the practical and theoretical “payoff” - of the concept of the labour theory of value. I tend to take the main “payoff” to be that this theory is an attempt to understand the persistent importance of the expenditure of human labour, given trends that, say, a random visitor from Mars (as well as many human utopian thinkers…) might believe “ought” to point to the gradual, but progressive, minimisation of the need to expend specifically human labour power in the process of production - e.g., trends toward increasing productivity, reducing the cost of the reproduction of labour power, certain types of symptomatic crisis, etc. - which seem like, if they were the only things operating in this social context, should gradually reduce the necessity for human labour power expenditure. Given that this reduction doesn’t seem to be happening, it looks as though there is some other kind of trend - a trend that compels the perpetual reconstitution of human labour power expenditure in new forms, as it is progressively phased out in older forms. Hence: the labour theory of value = why the hell do we value human labour so goddamn much?
Seen in this light, the discussion of value (and of surplus value) becomes an attempt to trace out how, in collective practice that isn’t specifically or directly seeking to enact some overarching “law”, something lawlike and compulsive could nevertheless be enacted.
I find that thinking about the problem this way tends to minimise problems that arise, if you try to read the text as though Marx is primarily concerned with, e.g., how to classify specific kinds of labour: he does classify all sorts of things, but the “eyes on the prize” level of the text is primarily trying to wrestle with this problem of how we get such complex and mutually contradictory dynamics around human labour. We can keep our eyes on this same prize - and then, potentially, reevaluate things Marx might say about particular kinds of labour, based on whether something might have historically changed, or whether Marx considered all the possible permutations, or whether he simply got one wrong… But the reason Marx is so careful, I think, to keep trying to distinguish the specifically “human” contribution to the surplus, is because he thinks it should strike us as really strange that such a thing should be required. He doesn’t think material production requires this - he doesn’t even think class domination requires this (cf. his example of medieval production in the fourth section of the first chapter). Something similar, I think, is at work in the distinctions he makes between whether particular kinds of labour are “productive” - he’s trying to set up for an analysis of tipping points at which constraints kick in to reconstitute into some new form, forms of labour displaced by other, countervailing, social trends…
I realise I’m oversimplifying massively - I’ll eventually get around to writing on this in much more detail. I’m also not taking a direct position on the slavery issue - other than to say that my position would start from the sorts of questions I’m mentioning above. I’ve just often thought that sometimes these sorts of issues arise when Marx is read with an eye to the distinctions he rolls out in his text, rather than with an eye to what sort of problem he was trying to use those distinctions to resolve? Working backwards from the core problem, certain apparently dubious dimensions of the text can sometimes be dissolved…
Comment by N. Pepperell — November 16, 2007 @ 3:32 am
another clear example of slave labour producing surplus value would be industrial production in the nazi camp system.
Comment by chabert — November 16, 2007 @ 12:58 pm
and kinda related, peter linebaugh on the continuum slavery-wage slavery:
Ford Motor Company had a plant in Cologne; it employed slave labor from Rostov, no wages, little food, work till they drop. A U.S. Army investigator in 1945 concluded Ford served as “an arsenal of Nazism, at least for military vehicles.” Henry Ford in 1938 accepted the highest medal Germany could bestow, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. Everyone knows what an anti-Semite Henry Ford was. For his own Mein Kampf, Hitler plagiarized from Henry Ford’s The Dearborn Independent; Hitler had a portrait of Henry Ford in his office; Hitler proudly proclaimed, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.”
Alfred Sloan, the president of General Motors defended in March 1938 after the invasion of Czechoslovakia their German operations as “highly profitable.” James Mooney, GM director of overseas operations, had discussions with Hitler two weeks after the invasion of Poland. GM manufactured the trucks that invaded Poland; the truck was called the Blitz. They re-tooled their Russelsheim plant to make the engines for the fighters of the Luftwaffe. French and Belgian prisoners comprised the labor force.
In this way it came about that when the Toledo Jeeps carried U.S. soldiers into Nazi Germany, they met German soldiers driving General Motor’s Opel. Whichever which way the war went the capitalist class was going to win.
The relative surplus population is a disposable population. The history of capitalism is also a history of planned morbidity, triage on a demographic scale, and racist genocide. Far from being exceptional, the Nazis brought these methods from the colonies, which all European empires employed, into Europe itself, with the regime of slave labor and death camps using the most modern “production” methods.
Comment by chabert — November 16, 2007 @ 1:08 pm
Thanks Colonel, NP.
NP, as much I really am concerned with what Marx said and meant (I’ve got a marxological streak a mile wide), I’m not really all that concerned with that so much as with readings of Marx, mostly mine. At the same time, I’m generally convinced that there’s very little if anything in the world that doesn’t fit within Marx’s categories. (That’s not to say that Marx explains it all, rather there’s just not much that actively contradicts or refutes Marx - “fit within” in the sense of “can co-exist with” I suppose, though I also do think Marx explains quite a bit. This makes me very much in agreement with your take on what you call the apparently dubious part of Marx - you’re basically arguing for the utility of reading Marx charitably, on which I’m totally with you.) My grasp of slavery related to all that had been a bad one; it now fits better - this post was my chain of reasoning re: that, that’s most of it really.
On the LTOV, I’m not super concerned to explain the continuing importance of labor myself - it’s sort of self-evident in my life. It’s really important. Work eats up most of my life and has for a long time (and has I think aged me a bit more than I’d like), and this is true for a lot of people. The LTOV for me is mostly just an orientation to that - work is really important. And the bit about profits and all that - that the boss employs us because he gets more out of doing so than it costs him. I’m pretty happy to make all of this pretty simplistic most of the time I suppose. (And if it wasn’t alraedy abundantly clear prior to this comment, I’m also apparently happy to ramble in a way only tangential to the conversation at hand, particularly when I’m so tired like I am just now, so I should really just go to bed.)
NP, have you read Cleaver’s book Reading Capital Politically? I need to re-read, it’s been a few years now, but that book was huge for me. It really shaped my orientation to a lot of this stuff and rekindled my excitement about marxism. Cleaver’s read as I remember it basically amounts to an opposition to hierarchical decision-making with regard to (and the violence which backs up) the distribution of surplus labor, though I don’t know that he’d accept that interpretation. Among other things, that makes the differences between capitalism and other modes of production less interesting and less important - class conflicts are over the quantity and quality of worktime and how that’s distributed, etc. Of course those conflicts have all sorts of factors which make them specific, but the differences in terms of marx’s logic are small I think. Okay, I’m not going to type my way to clarity this evening, so I’ll leave it off and come back to this later.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 17, 2007 @ 2:10 am
Hey Nate - sorry if I’m coming across as a “what Marx really meant” sort of person - I’m not so much trying to do that (although I do tend to try to read charitably, and not just with Marx), and I know that can be pedantic. My orientation is more to how to mobilise the theory in particular ways - some readings are more amenable to shaking particular kinds of things loose than others. I’m also probably overreacting to being around too many discussions that had a sort of… moralising? air, using Marx’s classifications around different kinds of labour, so I tend to push people on understanding what the classifications are for, and how they fit into a broader argument about capitalism as something that makes its own repressive forms of practical classifications as to what gets to “count” as labour in specific ways.
I also wasn’t trying so much to say that the labour theory of value is trying to establish that labour is important: I think this is often how the theory is read, and I actually think that reading tends to miss some interesting things that Marx was trying to do. First, I don’t think Marx thought that it needed to be established, the “fact” that labour is important - so he’s not making the sort of argument that goes “the proletariat really is central, but bourgeois relations conceal this and insist on the importance of a nonproductive class” (Lafargue’s critique of the ideology of productivism is, in a sense, a polemic on this understanding that the interests of the working class are served by some kind of political assertion of the importance of labour - not suggesting that you were making such an association at all - just associating myself to where I most often hear this particular interpretation of the labour theory of value).
What I do think Marx was curious about - in a non-exclusive sense (i.e., I’m not claiming this is the only thing Marx was curious about) - was why, in classical political economy, the importance or the centrality of labour was something that had to be discovered. In other words, the sort of “labour” that the “labour theory of value” is trying to theorise, isn’t “empirical” labour, in the sense of concrete labouring activities, but this strange, behind-the-backs-of-the-producers way in which “what counts as labour” gets established. I see the labour theory of value, as well as a number of the distinctions about productive and unproductive labour and similar things, to be aimed at understanding how you get this kind of subterranean social dynamic - how something “lawlike” gets brought into being, that no one - not even the capitalists who benefit massively from the operation of the system - is consciously trying to create. This doesn’t mean that capitalists aren’t consciously trying to do all sorts of things - Marx is quite clear on the levels of instrumentality, and planning, and sheer naked force involved. But those things aren’t generated by a group of capitalists getting together and saying, “How can we create this subterranean law that will both displace and reconstitute the need for the direct expenditure of human labour power in production, no matter how high the rate of productivity grows, and how easy it becomes to generate material wealth by other means”.
So the labour theory of value is sort of aimed at this level that Marx describes as (too lazy to look up exact quote!) “a process of production that has control over people”. His core questions are things like: why should society have to deciphered - why aren’t things just transparent (these are the questions he explicitly poses via the historical and counterfactual examples at the conclusion to the section on the fetish). Marx isn’t trying to assert or demonstrate that labour is important - he’s curious why it’s important in such a strange, indirect, compulsive sort of way, and why trends that would on their face seem to point beyond the centrality of labour, don’t manage to succeed. (Again, I’m not at all claiming that this is the only thing he’s interested in - only that some readings seem to underemphasise this dimension of his argument in a strong way, and there may be practical costs to that.)
On Cleaver: I have read him, but I don’t have a strong memory of how I reacted to the text - I’m trundling back through a large number of interpretations and critiques of Marx at the moment, and he’s one of the folks I’m planning on re-reading soon. I’d be able to comment more intelligibly on it then…
But I still feel like I’m sounding really pedantic in this comment
Apologies about this - some of the problem is that I’m intensively reading and writing at the moment, and so there’s a certain broken record element to my thought right now… I think there are practical payoffs to the things I emphasise in Marx, but I’m also trying to disentangle what I see as the main line of Marx’s argument - sort of the logical thrust of his argument in Capital, from more contingent or throwaway moments in that same text, and then to work out where I stand in relation to all this - where I’m jumping off from Marx, and where I might be reading in concerns of my own that probably aren’t in the text at all… So there’s a lot of “what did Marx mean” going on in my head right now, even though, in an overarching sense in terms of the theoretical work that interests me in the long term, I’m not specifically worried about Marx’s intent, if that makes any sense…
Comment by N. Pepperell — November 17, 2007 @ 3:02 am
hey NP,
I need to head out of the house to get some stuff done, but quickly - you didn’t come off as pedantic in the slightest, in this or the prior comment. I appreciate your comments and am happy to)get them (unambivalently so - in a way I would not be if you were being pedantic). I think we read Marx (or, get excited about different aspects of Marx) somewhat differently - and your reading is more fleshed out and theorized (ie, you have more arguments for it!) than mine. That makes for really productive exchanges. Unfortunately this term has been mostly one long beating by my institution so I’ve not had the time to really take sustained time and mental resources to really engage in a solid and reflective way with these conversations. All I can manage is an immediate meander through my reactions - actually, an immediate meander in which I discover my initial reactions - which is what I was doing the post. In a sense, I read through your comments (this is how I read your posts) and mentally tick boxes - “yes I agree 100%” “hmm, not sure about that” “yes but I’d phrase it differently or emphasize a different element” - next to your points, then I sketch some brief notes attached to those ticked boxes, either trying to run with the ball a bit if I ticked box #1 or trying to figure out why I ticked the other two. That’s all I was doing in the comment, sorry if I gave the impression that I thought you were being pedantic, that wasn’t what I thought and wasn’t what I intended to convey. Okay, I really need to run. More later.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 17, 2007 @ 12:42 pm
can’t follow all of this, but i’m going to get all fuckin’ marx-ed out, and out marx nate.
No transhistorical categories fool. serious though, surplus value is created (and even arguably in some peasant economies), but capital sets out to explain the peculiar relation of surplus value, capital, and wage-labor in the era of capitalism marx lived. Surplus value is a different deal under slavery, though analogous, it would require different concepts.
now the REALLY important shit. I’ve been thinking of getting this tattoo the girl in the picture has
http://www.polkagris.nu/ar/aronline/ar_47.html
but maybe have it on my chest or back in old english writing. My worry is that because of the kamunist kranti article you will never read, i don’t believe in the sufficiency of m-c-m’ for describing capital (i’m so positivistic). shit’s getting real though, i’m taking it to luxemburg’s prim acc to scope it out.
Comment by todd — November 17, 2007 @ 6:41 pm
The Times of November 1857 contains an utterly delightful cry of outrage on the part of a West-Indian plantation owner. This advocate analyses with great moral indignation – as a plea for the re-introduction of Negro slavery – how the Quashees (free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption, and, alongside this use-values regard loafing (indulgence and idleness) as a real luxury good; how they do not care a damn for the sugar and the fixed capital invested in the plantations but rather observe the planter’s impending bankruptcy with an ironic grin of malicious pleasure – Grundrisse
Comment by chabert — November 18, 2007 @ 7:31 am
hey all,
I couldn’t get the link to open so I can’t advise on the tattoo. I’m generally pro-tattoo, though.
I’m a bit under the weather just now, so sorry for the brevity but thanks for the comments. Colonel, is that article online anyplace? Todd, likewise - drop a link in here and I SWEAR I WILL READ THE ARTICLE. And by all means, out-Marx me. Then you can start teaching me instead of me always having to school you.
Gotta run
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 18, 2007 @ 3:54 pm
Who are the real brownshirts in Toledo?
Comment by chabert — November 19, 2007 @ 6:43 am
(feel better)
Comment by chabert — November 19, 2007 @ 6:44 am