View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
The supreme ideal of capitalist production is—at the same time as it increases net produce in a relative way—to reduce as much as possible the number of those who live on wages, and to increase as much as possible the number of those who live on net produce.
The Enquête represents a significant expansion on the questions previously posed in the IWMA efforts. Indeed, it entails a fundamentally qualitative shift: rather than pursuing a broad knowledge of workers’ situations, the questionnaire rigorously scrutinises the immediate dynamics of the capitalist labour-process. Its political character is obvious: through pursuing the questions, the respondent is led to consider the disjuncture between workers and capitalists, and is faced with an empirical demonstration of opposing interests in the capitalist organisation of work. [...]
The work of Marx, who claimed “I am not a Marxist”, has often been misrepresented as an abstract philosophical effort, or worse, an ideology. The importance of the questionnaire throughout Marx’s political life, from its centrality within the IWMA to the survey of La Revue Socialiste, demonstrates the opposite, and underlines the practical import at the core of Marxism: a tool for understanding and advancing proletarian power in the class-struggle.
Capital is concentrated social force, while the workman has only to dispose of his working force. The contract between capital and labour can therefore never be struck on equitable terms, equitable even in the sense of a society which places the ownership of the material means of life and labour on one side and the vital productive energies on the opposite side. The only social power of the workmen is their number. The force of numbers, however is broken by disunion. The disunion of the workmen is created and perpetuated by their unavoidable competition among themselves.
[...] Are we living in a new stage of capitalism, though, or are today's digital technologies just a different version of our ancestors railroads and six-shooters, our Silicon Valley titans just the newest update to the ketchup and steel tycoons of an earlier, east-coast fantasy of wealth and opportunity? Identifying what makes our moment unique (or not) is no easy task, in part because we are living in it, and in part because the language we have to understand and describe our era's inequality is itself one of the instruments of perpetuating it. How can we think and act critically in the present when the very medium of the present, language, constantly betrays us?
[...] "hegemony" shows us how the interests of a ruling class become the commonsense of others. Hegemony, he argues, comes to "depend for its hold not only on its expression of the interests of a ruling class but also on its acceptance as 'normal reality' or 'commonsense' by those in practice subordinated to it." [...]
maybe useful
[...] Schools like Wework are ultimately invested in reproducing a kind of ideal personality suited to the alternately dystopian and Pollyana-ish mindset of today's US elite: an autonomous individual entrepreneur built from kindergarten, whose potential can only be realized in the struggle for wealth accumulation, and whose creativity can only be productively exercised for profit. [...]
apparently wework has a school called wegrow and it is horrible
"Noeliberalism" is sometimes used in a similar shorthand way - basically, to name everything bad about the contemporary world - and there is considerable disagreement about the term's meaning and scope. Some dismiss it as leftist jargon, meaningful in too many different ways to be useful. David Harvey defines it rather succinctly, though, as "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade," all of which are to be enforced by a strong state. Quinn Slobodian's recent intellectual history of neoliberalism has emphasized the project's goals - primarily the "complete protection of private capital rights" from democratic interference - and the importance of "extra-economic" means to secure these rights. These extra-economic means can include, for example, global institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), which can override national laws that restrict capital's power. [...]
more defs of neolib! this one includes criticism of the term's overly broad usage
[...] Relentlessly busy, visionary, and creatively enterprising, speculating upon the future appreciation of one's present (educational and material) assets, the financially leavened-self treats work as a way to pursue one's purpose. Work as labor - exhausting, exploitative, but performed with and for others - fades into the background of work as the acquisition of self. [...]
alternatively: slides grimly
p,,,[ Audaciously taking its name from the shops it set out to displace and superfluous if not sinister in the actual service it purported to offer - a sort of glorified vending machine with facial recognition software - Bodega crystalllized the venality of the tech economy. All that technical expertise, and for what?
daaamn