What in the hell …

I ran across this article, “Toward a Breakdown of the Capitalist Subject?” via a post at Jodi’s. I think the piece is inadequate and evidences a widespread and mistaken understanding of capitalism which overemphasizes the sphere of circulation; this is common in conversations that conflate (anti-)capitalism with (anti-)neoliberalism. (more…)

I’ve had all this common/commons stuff on my mind lately (I got some links to toss in here later, they’re on another computer). A while back when I was doing a bit of reading on slavery in the US it struck me that slave labor at least some of the time involved an ongoing use by slaveholders of land which slaves held in common, in a sense. That is, slave owners could offload reproductive costs and so forth onto slaves, cheapening the cost of maintaining slaves. (In my opinion one of the many things that’s interesting about the history of slavery - really, the history of any forms of exploitation - is how it can clarify one’s marxism.) At this level of generality, this is what goes on with waged labor as well - we reproduce ourselves day to day and year to year and many of us reproduce in the sense of having children, thus making more workers. We don’t do so in order to enrich anyone monetarily, but we still produce life and lives appropriated under capitalism. (more…)

I’m still in prefatory mode with regard to the reading group on chapter 25 of v1 of Capital. Duncan and NP have kicked things off good and proper with posts on chapter 25. There’s been some particularly substantial discussion at Duncan’s, I need to re-read it soon when I’ve had more sleep than I did during my first read through. Check it out.

Like I said, I’m in prefatory mode still. This post is my notes on chapter 24. Chapter 25 next, soon-ish. (more…)

So several folk around this corner of the bloggiverse are going to use some fancy web technology to coordinate us reading some Marx together, to up our interaction density. I’m pretty sure we’re going to read ch25 of v1 of Capital. Other folk are of course welcome to join in. The idea is simple - read the chapter, post on it, read others’ posts, make comments and conversation. Should be fun. (more…)

My sympathies decline a good deal at the edges of the bargaining unit, so to speak, but I recognize that that some bosses are worse than others. It’s still important to read these in a way that ups one’s anger, not lessens it - other bosses are not better because some are inhumanly evil.

By ‘anything’ I mean ‘my work,’ actually. I’m halfway through the Steinfeld. It’s gotten better but is still pretty slow going. It feels very much like a pretty far remove from a lot of what I’m doing. It’s in the same ballpark I guess but not a work that speaks directly to my project. (more…)

I just started Robert Steinfeld’s book The Invention of Free Labor. It’s good so far. Here’s what I take from it at this point. (more…)

I’m three or four episodes into season two of The Wire, continuing but slowing my binge. One of the themes of show that I didn’t talk about before is money. Essentially what the police are doing is regulating the illegal economy. (With regard to the informal economy, the illegal economy is constituted in part by the exclusion of some commodities from legal salability, despite their actual salability: sexual services, violence, drugs… commodities for nonproductive consumption as well as commodities needed to produce these endline products.) With regard to the union as well as the theme in season one where the Barksdale investigation starts to get into campaign contributions, the issue is the mobility of money as well as where money comes from. The money travels. I can’t recall the exact wording but there’s a Marx quote about this: money doesn’t show its origins. Looking at the dollar in someone’s pocket doesn’t tell anyone where the money came from.

On the other hand…. D’Angelo says at one point in the discussing on Fitzgerald, “the past is always with us, where we come from, what we go through (…) You can change up, you can give yourself a whole new story but what came first is who you really are and what happened before is what really happened.” In a sense this is what McNulty is fighting to change or to create with regard to the dead woman who he wants to keep from becoming a Jane Doe cadaver used for medical school dissections. This can apply to money. (To be clear, this can be made to apply to money by some people, in the right contexts with the right actions - this is determined contextually.) The investigation draws on records of political contributions and other records maintained by the state. Money per se doesn’t demonstrate its origins but these origins can be tracked or found out, at least potentially. What’s more, the origins of money can have meaning some of the time, which in a political context can be damaging. Just as the surveillance van packed in a shipping container gets shipped around with more and more union locals slapping bumper stickers on it, money circulates and accumulates potential meanings. This is why politicians worry about people finding out that their campaigns were built with money that came from drugs. Along the same lines, where the union leader gets his money matters, to some extent to his base (I’m guessing it will, I haven’t seen what happens yet) and of course due to the consequences imposed for breaking the law. Money doesn’t show its origins but origins can matter. Money’s mobility is real but the conversion from M to C to M and back again doesn’t mean that it doesn’t retain echoes of its origins. Or rather, it doesn’t mean that people can’t uncover its origins and choose to make it meaningful. The economy narrowly understood exists in relation to systems of values, moral economies and so forth, which in some contexts are important as (or in?) power relations. (I think this is among the reasons that Marx goes on about the blood that clings to capital.) (Regardless of origins of course money is still capable of serving a role in domination/subordination, in a context of social power relations. Money as subordination. A big part of Ziggy’s persona is him trying to get out from the domination of money - as an assertion of his masculinity - in ways that throw it in the face of people trapped by this subordination..)