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So Marx makes two predictions that do not seem to follow from the basic theory of historical materialism. This yields a startling result: one can believe Marx’s theory of history, yet argue that within this theory there is no good reason to think that capitalism will end, or, if it does, that it will be replaced by communism. This would make one a very peculiar sort of follower of Marx, but is an entirely coherent position.

But what about the theory itself ? Nothing I have said so far is intended to cast doubt on the main claims that history is the story of the development of human productive power, or that societies rise and fall on the basis of whether they further or impede that growth. So we should look at this now.

Much of the weight of the theory comes down to the following claim: that should a form of society frustrate the growth of the productive forces, then, eventually, that society will give way. Now this may be true, and certainly supporters of Marx have tried hard to establish it. But let us consider a (fictional) example. Imagine a society of great class division. A small aristocracy has both wealth and power, and is protected in its privilege by a strong, well-paid, military. The remainder of the people, who do most of the work, are relatively impoverished. However their sense of community is so strong that they do not resent their place in society, and their religious belief further supports their acquiescence. They see their rulers as social betters, entitled to their advantages.

imo a better way of thinking about this comes from the concept of genetic drift (eventually an allele will get eliminated, or to put it another way, eventually that society will collapse)

—p.111 Assessment (100) by Jonathan Wolff 7 years, 6 months ago

So the labour theory of value does not explain the source of profit. Consequently the law of the declining rate of profit fails too, for that starts from the assumption that only labour can create value. Does it also follow that workers are not even exploited? Here opinions differ. Some have argued that once the labour theory of value falls there is no basis left for the charge that workers are exploited. But others believe that there is still a strong argument to be made. Suppose you work eight hours a day. Imagine that there is nothing you can buy with your wage that took more than a total of four hours to make. There appears, then, a clear sense in which you have lost something in this. We can say, surely, that there has been an unequal exchange of labour. Someone else is getting the benefit of some of your labour. The truth of this does not depend on any particular theory of value or profit.

Now, is it true that workers under capitalism are exploited in this sense? For the affluent workers of developed economies, probably not. Most Western workers can command more hours of labour than they have to work; provided it is the labour of Third World workers. A day’s Western wages might buy you weeks of an Indian or Chinese labourer’s work. These are the truly exploited (although who is the exploiter is a more subtle question); and often work in exactly the condition Marx wrote about in the England of the mid-nineteenth century.

ugh I strongly disagree with this but idk to what extent I'm reading Marx "correctly" vs just assigning my personal intuition re: LTV to his words. it makes sense if you think of "value" as "paying a person to do something" (like sell their time, or agree to something) since money doesn't mean anything except to people

also, "who is the exploiter" isn't a good question when it's the entire global system

(added later): thought about this some more. I guess what he's saying is that it doesn't explain variations in the source of profit, which is true, it doesn't. otoh, i don't think it has to--it's essentially a value judgment, just like Adorno's critiques of the culture industry are value judgments and not necessarily attempts to explain anything. the real first-order mistake, imo, is to read Marx as a scientific/rational means of explaining things (even if that's what he purports to offer) rather than a normative way of looking at the world

—p.116 Assessment (100) by Jonathan Wolff 7 years, 6 months ago

The now well-known point is that the market is a fantastic information exchange. Changing prices are signals of shortage and surplus. Furthermore, the capitalist market gives people an incentive to respond to these signals in the search to maximize profits (private vices, public virtues again). Take away the market and the profit motive and you remove both signal and incentive. However skilled the planner, it is impossible to gain the quantity of fine-grained information about consumer demand and changing market conditions that even a small market automatically produces. But even if we did have this information, responding efficiently also relies on a level of good will and power we are unlikely to see. Despite its apparent attractions a planned economy just cannot do what it is designed for.

what??? what??? I need to read more critiques of markets to develop a more eloquent response to this but this feels so off: 1) assuming rationality; 2) ignoring the power dynamics inherent in a purchasing power distribution that's not equivalent to need

also tell me how this applies to bitcoin u fucking melt

—p.120 Assessment (100) by Jonathan Wolff 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] accelerationism is best defined--in political, aesthetic, and philosophical terms--as the argument that the only way out is through. In order to overcome globalized neoliberal capitalism, we need to drain it to the dregs, push it to its most extreme point, follow it into its furthest and strangest consequences. As Bertolt Brecht put it years ago, "Don't start from the good old things but the bad new ones." The hope is that, by exacerbating our current conditions of existence, we will finally be able to make them explode, and thereby move beyond them.

—p.2 Introduction to Accelerationism (1) by Steven Shaviro 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] science fiction as a genre does not claim to actually predict the future. Rather, it works to extrapolate elements of the present, to consider what these elements might lead to if allowed to reach their full potential. That is to say, science fiction is not about the actual future but about the futurity that haunts the present. It grasps, and brings to visibility, what Deleuze calls the virtual dimension of existence, or what Marx calls tendential processes.

Science fiction takes up certain implicit conditions of our personal and social lives, and makes these conditions fully explicit in narrative. It picks out "futuristic" trends that are already embedded within our actual social and technological situation. These trends are not literal matters of fact, but they really exist as tendencies or potentialities. In the words of Deleuze, they are "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and symbolic without being fictional." They are potentials for change, growth, or decay, bu they have not fully expressed themselves or done all that they can do. And they may not ever do so, since (as Marx points out) a tendency is always accompanied by "counteracting factors" that can inhibit or even reverse it.

—p.2 Introduction to Accelerationism (1) by Steven Shaviro 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] I define neoliberalism as a specific mode of capitalist production (Marx), and form of governmentality (Foucault), that is characterized by the following specific factors:

  1. The dominating influence of financial institutions, which facilitate transfers of wealth from everybody else to the already extremely wealthy [...]
  2. The privatization and commodification of what used to be common or public goods [...]
  3. The extraction, by banks and other large corporations, of a surplus from all social activities: not only from production (as in the classical Marxist model of capitalism) but from circulation and consumption as well. Capital accumulation proceeds not only by direct exploitation but also by rent-seeking, by debt collection, and by outright expropriation ("primitive accumulation").
  4. The subjection of all aspects of life to the so-called discipline of the market [...]
  5. The redefinition of human beings as private owners of their own "human capital". Each person is thereby, as Michel Foucault puts it, forced to become "an entrepreneur of himself." [...]

good overview

—p.7 Introduction to Accelerationism (1) by Steven Shaviro 7 years, 6 months ago

What lurks behind this analysis is the frustrating sense of an impasse. Among its other accomplishments, neoliberal capitalism has also robbed us of the future. For it turns everything into an eternal present. The highest values of our society--as preached in the business schools--are novelty, innovation, and creativity. And yet these always only result in more of the same [...] as Ernst Block once put it, in a state of "sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability; where everything ought to be constantly new, everything remains just as it was."

—p.10 Introduction to Accelerationism (1) by Steven Shaviro 7 years, 6 months ago

But Hayek's market utopia does not take Keynesian uncertainty into account. Since we cannot quantify the future in probabilistic terms, it cannot be captured in terms of the "information" provided by the price system. Despite its supposedly self-correcting mechanisms, the "market" is as subject to unanticipated consequences and inefficient, disequilibrating outcomes as any planning mechanism would be. We should therefore reject the entire dichotomy between central planning, on the one hand, and market "rationality" on the other. Neither mechanism is guaranteed to produce desirable (or efficient) outcomes; neither is likely to reach any sort of equilibrium; both are subject to shocks and ruptures that cannot be contained within probabilistic calculations of risk.

[...] despite Hayek's idealization of the market, no corporation actually works by responding to the "information" conveyed in price signals. Rather capitalist firms themselves engage in massive central planning, in order to manipulate supply, demand, and profit. In other words, planning will take place in any case. It is never as efficacious as the planners wish, but neither is it as futile and ineffective as Hayek claims. The real problem, given the actuality of planning, is to ensure that it is done democratically and accountably, rather than (as at present) by managers and plutocrats accountable only to their corporation's bottom line. [...]

—p.19 Introduction to Accelerationism (1) by Steven Shaviro 7 years, 6 months ago

Aesthetic accelerationism, unlike the politico-economic kind, does not claim any efficiency for its own operations. It revels in depicting situations where the worst depredations of capitalism have come to pass, and where people are not only unable to change things but are even unable to imagine trying to change things. This is capitalist realism in full effect. [...]

after a passage on Paolo Bacigalupi's story The People of Sand and Slug (post-apocalypse)

—p.39 Acceleration Aesthetics (25) by Steven Shaviro 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] In today's neoliberal, globalized network society, "the monopoly of capital" has indeed become "a fetter upon the mode of production." We can see this in all sorts of ways. So-called austerity programs transfer ever more wealth to the already rich, at the price of undermining living standards for the population as a whole. The privatization of formerly public services and the expropriation of formerly common resources undermine the very infrastructures that are essential for long-term survival. "Digital rights management" and copy protection restrict the flow of data and cripple the power of the computing technologies that make them possible in the first place. [...]

And yet, none of these contradictions have caused the system to collapse or have even remotely menaced its expanded reproduction. As Deleuze and Guattari say, "no one has ever died from contradictions". Instead, capitalism perpetuates itself through a continual series of readjustments. Despite the fact that we have reached a point where capitalist property relations have become an onerous "fetter upon the mode of production" that they initially helped to put into motion, this fetter shows no sign of being lifted. [...] The "capitalist integument" has failed to "burst asunder"; instead, it has calcified into a rigid carapace, well-nigh suffocating the life within.

—p.44 Parasites on the Body of Capital (41) by Steven Shaviro 7 years, 6 months ago