Long Ass Post About Politics

2024-11-10

"The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves." - Gilles Deleuze

Well I'm sorry dear reader, but right now I am going to give in to the repressive forces and say a whole lot of stuff. I tried not to write this post, I really did. No one wants to hear another white boy's ramblings about communism. I will try to save my ego from the guilt of going against what Daddy Deluze told me to do, by making a point of the fact that it really could have been much worse. By which I mean, I have no way of knowing if you've read all or any of this. And you have no real way of indicating to me that you have done so outside of going out of your way to contact me personally and let me know. I fully assume that a majority of readers closed this tab the second their eyes passed over the word "communism". In other words, I have forgone any notion of "exposure" here. No one visits websites any more, and no one reads blogs any more, and especially no one reads very long blog posts. I will not syndicate this post anywhere other than my rss and atom feeds. There will not be discoverability, there will not cybernetic feedback. I'm writing this purely as an act of creation for the sake of it, because I think it will be cathartic. I can hope it ends up being fascinating to someone else. God forbid anyone finds it "informative".

So what is this beast. It is a disconnected assortment of diatribes in relation to various aspects of left-wing thought which I have been considering lately.

Why I Call Myself A Communist

I used to call myself an "anarchist". These days I call myself a "Communist". Why is that, and what changed? Am I just ideology shopping? It's actually a rather boring reason. I believe, as I have for a long time, that communism, properly understood, is anarchist; and anarchism, properly understood, is communist. Why then pick one name over the other. Just a historical technicality.

In the 19th century there were three main strains of socialism, associated with three figures: Ferdinand Lassalle, Mikhail Bakunin, and Karl Marx. Roughly speaking, the Lassallists were social democrats, the Bakuninists called themselves anarchists, and the Marxists called themselves communists. Out of the three, the genealogy with which I find myself most connected is the Marxist one. Therefore I call myself a communist.

Some on the left seem to radically change their mind on fundamental issues constantly. This garners accusations of "ideology shopping". While I don't think changing one's mind is something to be derided, there certainly is a strange aspect to this process. One week you're a marxist-leninist, the next you're a Marxist-leninist-maoist, dengist, gonzaloist, anarcho-syndicalist, post-left individualist etc. It's a pretty amusing process to watch unfold. What leads to this embarrassing public display are the following two characteristics: over-confidence in any particular ideological strain, driven by over-identification. It's a response to the overwhelming quantity of information with which we are presented by modern technology. In order to avoid living in a constant state of confusion and uncertainty, holding many ideas in one's head without the capacity to differentiate their respective value, one might over-correct into heavily identifying with a particular brand of information, before lurching rapidly into another brand and so on. I however, have never suffered this problem, and have therefore been left with the initial situation to deal with, that being a state in which I find it hard to ever pin down the relative value of anything I read. I read all sorts of things, from all sorts of perspectives (including non-leftist ones), and I tend to come away thinking "yeah, they have a point". After a while, this isn't very helpful. You have to become decisive and selective eventually, or any sense of meaning is lost. So in the years since I first called myself an "anarchist" as a teenage punk-rocker, I finally make a decision to jump ship on ideological self-labelling, on a historical technicality. This is not to say I haven't changed my views since then, obviously in between the initial stage of having read the wikipedia page for anarcho-syndicalism to now, after absorbing thousands of pages and hundreds of hours of lectures on political theory, my perspective couldn't possibly be the same. A vision of the sort of political strain I find the most value in is beginning to emerge blurilly from out of this mess, so perhaps in the future I'll be able to give some sort of precise and confident answer to this un-asked question. For the time being, I lack the confidence to go around labelling myself so clearly and precisely. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's not, in my classic uncertain mindset, I can't decide.

It's also worth noting that I consider Georges Bataille a greater influence on my thought than Karl Marx is, but there isn't a commonly used word for his particular brand of "communism", or whatever you want to call it. Whatever the case may be, it's clear I have to read more.

Three Categories Of Modern Leftist Thought

In parallel to the three historical branches of socialism I outlined in the previous segment, I have identified three branches which the modern left might be sorted into. Consider this to be basically a joke. These three categories are based on the solution to the problem of how to organise production on a society wide level. Pretty much every leftist already has organisation within particular firms figured out, the broad strokes at least. We're talking here about how to organise the society wide coordination of production and distribution between firms.

Firstly we have the group I will call the "Market Socialists". Some examples of these people might be Yanis Varoufakis, Richard Wolff, maybe Bernie Sanders. Actually Existing Market Socialism might be found in Tito's Yugoslavia (home to my grandparents), and perhaps we'll throw in the Nordic Model too. The idea is, you don't have to solve the problem of society wide coordination of production, you just delegate that job to The Market, since it's already there I guess we may as well make use of it. You get socialised or nominally socialised firms, and a Well Regulated market in between them. For example Varoufakis advocates a reformation of the law regarding shares, where each worker is given one share, shares can't be sold or traded, and one share = one vote within the firm, alongside various market regulations. They haven't quite figured out how to deal with the problems that arise from the bit where this is definitely still just capitalism, but give them some time. I guess I'll throw in some mention of Italian Fascist Syndicalism so you can enjoy reading up on that also.

Secondly, we have the group I will call the "socialist cyberneticians". Some examples of these people might be, marxist-leninists who are actually marxist-leninists and not just lying capitalists (i'm not sure why capitalists do this), and the participatory economics people (all 5 of them). Actually Existing Socialist Cybernetician society might be the soviet union and Allende's Chile. This group wants to solve the issue of coordinating production by copying the model of Germany's World War 1 war economy. In other words, these are the central planning folks. They take the nominally collectively managed form of the management of individual firms, and recursively generalise it over the whole economy. These people really love project cybersyn, and I'll give it to you, that control room did have excellent interior design. When you inform them that cybersyn's function was literally strike breaking, they will insist that the striking truck drivers were in fact CIA plants. And the worst part is I think they might be right.

Finally, we have the "eco-anthropologists". These guys love saying the word "ways". It's not cooking, it's "foodways". It's not social organisation, it's "ways of living". They aim to solve the problem by just shrinking and simplifying society until the division of labour isn't a problem any more. Yeah you might not be able to manufacture glasses, but at least we'll still have an inhabitable planet to live on in 100 years. They kind of have a point there. They tend to take inspiration from various indigenous groups, arguing that people have been living communally before capitalism, and on the outskirts of capitalism to this day, and that their living practice ought to be the primary inspiration for socialist society. Oh I forgot to list examples, uhhh the Unibomber. Actually existing eco-anthropology might be Zomian hill tribes and pre-Columbian indigenous American societies.

Bonus round: There are some people who don't want to do any future-thinking or problem-solving like this and instead focus on purely negating the here and now. Those guys are all French so no one cares.

The LTV

A spectre is haunting Marxism - the spectre of the labour theory of value. For some reason a bunch of people think that Marx had one, and that Marxism hinges on it being provably correct. This is bizarre to me as Marx never said this. Please note: this is a low effort shit post, I don't want to go through the effort of leafing through Capital to find supporting quotes and evidence from scripture as I write this because that would constitute work, something to which I am diametrically opposed. You can believe me if you want, or not, I really don't care. Marx never says he has a labour theory of value. Go ahead, control-f your pdf of Capital for "labour theory of value" - it's not in there.

Ok so what, Marx doesn't specifically use the phrase "labour theory of value". He still clearly has one. Isn't it strange though? That the idea of the LTV is so closely attached to a book which doesn't contain the words?

Next, might we look at the subtitle of Capital. "a critique of political economy". Political economy, in Marx's day, basically meant macroeconomics. The entire book is dedicated as a critique of macroeconomics. Not "Capital, a critique of capitalism". This is why I have a burning hatred for economising Marxists. You've missed the entire point.

So what is Marx's theory of value. The LTV is often explained in something like the following basic terms: A worker in a factory produces widgets. After some time, she has produced enough widgets that their sale would pay for her rent, clothes, food, repaying debts from education, and any other basic expenditures which allow her to come to work again the next day (reproduce her labour power). But she does not stop working. Instead, she continues working some surplus time, during which the value of the products she creates is extracted by the lazy capitalist. The evil capitalist, who contributed nothing to production, steals surplus value from our worker. Isn't that all a big shame. I've even seen it dumbed down further to just noting that the workplace can continue to function without the boss, but not without the workers. Therefore it must be the workers who produce the value.

This is not a bad description of the ideas of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but has very little to do with Marx. Marx is interested in interrogating the value-form. The historically specific concept of "value". Anti-marxists sometimes like to counter proponents of the LTV by saying something about how the capitalist brings value by investing in capital and making management decisions. Well Marx would have pretty much agreed. This is literally the entire point. The mode of production forces us to split into two distinct classes, one class who only has their labour power, and one class with other kinds of powers. While they say the workplace could do fine without a boss, but not without the workers, this is incorrect. Without the boss, the capitalist mode of production can't function, because the workers are alienated from the set of powers which the capitalist has. You wouldn't be able to do any production, because you wouldn't own any capital. Once those alienated powers are reconciled within the workers, i.e. they own the means of production, you no longer have a capitalist mode of production, and you no longer have the capitalist value-form. Marx was basically arguing against the LTV, by pointing out how the class distinctions which the capitalist mode of production generates makes it impossible.

Marx even gets to the bottom of where this particular value-form originates, how it has to have originated. In order for us to have ended up in a situation like this, there must have been some point at which society was split up into these two classes. Where one group of people became alienated from a particular set of powers excepting their labour-power, and another group became alienated from their labour-power and were left with all of their other powers. Indeed if we flip to the back of our copy of Capital, we'll find the entire conclusion is focused on primitive accumulation, which Marx calls "nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production." There we will see Marx goes to great pains to elucidate the historical process of primitive accumulation as it happened in England. To cut a very long story short, they expropriated the peasants' shit by force of violence. In as clear terms as possible, the origin of the capitalist value-form is forcible expropriation.

The expropriation of land leads to the development of the proletarian class. The compulsion of the proletariat to work develops the system of wage labour. The system of wage labour necessitates the conquering of the purely qualitative use-value-form by the purely quantitative exchange-value-form or just value-form.

Commodities have a double-character of value - as use-value and as exchange value. Labour, too has a double character - as abstract labour and as concrete labour. Abstract labour produces exchange values, and concrete labour produces use values. When I say "produces" I don't just mean produces something valuable in this way, I also mean produces the particular form which value takes on. The social idea of abstract labour produces the capitalist value-form.

Large scale commodity markets, on which all manner of commodities are traded, require the form of an abstract quantification of labour. Pre-capitalist exchange based on use-values required only to focus on specific cases of concrete applications of labour. The value-form is produced via a socially standardised quantification of labour as abstract labour-time, whereby one quanta of labour-time can be compared with another quanta of labour-time, even though the specific character of those two labours might be completely different. In medieval Europe, the kind of labour undertaken by the peasant class was not considered comparable or exchangeable with the kind of labour undertaken by the priestly class (in praying, studying, transcribing etc.), or the aristocratic class (in management, political negotiation, fighting as a knight etc.)

Abstract labour cannot be measured in terms other than money. When one takes a look at the clock to measure the labour time required for some person to produce some good, they are necessarily measuring the specific amount of time it takes some specific person to concretely perform some specific amount of labour. Only once the product of this labour is exchanged for money is it then transformed into abstract labour. Many economising Marxists have made the error of trying to measure and quantify abstract labour directly without the mediating factor of money, failing to grasp that labour only becomes abstracted once it's embodied form is exchanged for money.

Quantitative forms of value have existed in the past, mainly when it came to taxes, but they were never the predominant form of value until the development of capitalism. The value-form is a function of the class stratification via primitive accumulation.

It's possible to rephrase this in the language developed by James C Scott in Seeing Like A State, where the social construction of abstract labour and value are an imposition of legibility in order to map disconnected instances of concrete labour and use-value. In the language of management cybernetics, abstract labour is a function which reduces the variety of inputs to the system. The idea that qualitatively different kinds of concrete labour can all be directly compared as elements of total abstract labour is not a natural category, it was socially produced during the process of primitive accumulation, and this process was documented. When labour is performed in the capitalist mode, that work has the double character of producing use-values, but more relevant, reproducing the social category of value.

So going on and on debating with bourgeois economists over labour theory of value vs marginal utility pretty much misses the entire point of Marx's analysis. Marx isn't so much trying to figure out how capitalist markets function as-is, he's trying to get at how it can be the case that such a thing is possible in the first place. Bourgeois economists before Marx had taken the idea that labour can be quantified into money as a given, Marx's important development was to not take this as given and discover this two-fold characteristic of labour, as abstract and concrete. He's more of a social theorist than an economist.

It's hard to understand to what extent Marx is praising this quantifying process or repudiating it. He surely takes pains to detail the great suffering which was caused by the enclosure movements. Capital is an unfinished work, we will never know what Marx intended to imply. Who knows if he'd even agree with my selective reading of his works. Possibly not. For me, once I take this value-form theory and combine it with Bataille's notions of excess, general economy, sovereignty, sacrifice; I form the basis of my economic and political perspective.

What is to be done

Don't work! Take whatever welfare the state will allow you, by fraud if you have to. Get together with a group and pool your resources to extend them. To avoid work, you may need to rely on exploiting markets which the state prohibits capitalists from accessing.

Of course, there exist many coercive forces which compel people to work. If you must work, sabotage, publish trade secrets, undermine the institution of work at any opportunity.

If you can't do that, work slowly. Work to the minimum letter of your contract and never more. Get your co-workers in on the scheme. As The Coming Insurrection points out, work has a twofold character, that of exploitation, and that of participation. They say that this is counter to Marx, but I say they are just rephrasing concrete and abstract labour in different terms.

Capitalist relations must be reproduced in time, from one moment to the next. Interrupt that reproduction.

The great thing about refusal of work is it comes extremely naturally to the worker. It does not require a mass of convincing or theorising. It does not require mass organisation. It took place 3180 years ago in ancient Egypt. It has sometimes been given the name of a "strike", but it encompasses more than just the act of striking. In China, it's called tǎngpíng , bǎi làn, and mō yú In japan, it's called hikikomori and otaku. In the west it has been called "quiet quitting". A general strike that happens beneath our noses, before we have even realised it.

P.S.

I feel a large amount of guilt over this post, as I outlined in the first section. I'm trying to understand why. I feel guilty about contributing the mess that is online leftism, I feel kind of "cringe" even saying the phrase "online leftism". But plenty of other posts on this blog have been political, and politically left-wing. I should try to pass over this guilt I think, it's not a helpful feeling. There's nothing wrong with this post fundamentally. So even though I considered deleting it multiple times, after sitting on it for a day I have decided yeah, it's worth getting out there. Of course I made the decision to open this text with a preamble with that Deleuze quote and pre-emptively excusing myself for creating this post. This was probably a mistake. Although I think there's a point there, ultimately it's better to take ownership of things fully.