Hi Zig Forums, former editor of bunkermag and spectrerouge here. I've decided to start my own independent blog and I just published this essay on Zizek, looking at his value and where he drifts into idealism.
Zizek and His Limits
Nathaniel Evans
Ayden Miller
Saw you post this on twitter earlier, reading through it atm, pretty good so far but I'm a brainlet so I'm not overly familiar.
Joshua Flores
I appreciate it user. Hopefully I didnt make it too technical
John King
Don't think the technicality is a problem, if I'm not familiar with an author's work it's not your fault you're neccessitated to use technical terms in order to construct the piece.
Henry Miller
Good essay but you should (re)read anti-Oedipus, I don't have Less than Nothing with me and I'm too bored to write about it now, but the problem of symbolic non-contingency and detotalization are pretty much what a BwO means, no?
I think schizoanalysis would pass better than Stirner in the consciousness stuff too, maybe as an addition?
But you can be as vulgar as you want, who cares, the Revolution in note 14 will also violently throw away all the names thrown at her and alienation is the railroads of the 21st century if you think about it.
Jackson Ramirez
I'm not as familiar with D&G with regard to the stuff on ontology and consciousness, their writing style is somewhat obtuse
David Reyes
"Limits"? The dude sucks ass.
Jason Adams
That's no excuse for a Zizekfags, of all things. Also the ontological incompleteness of the subject that you assume(?) as an admittance of transhistoricity of capital is once again a material analysis of the point de capiton in revolutionary theory, namely that all the leaky edges is the Event slowly coming from the future.
I'm a Landfag ofcourse but you can shit on him as much as you like, I'd recommend Badiou's views on the Event though, how they correspond with Lacan and Badiou's Maoism to assert the necessity of people's war for the subject to awake and all that.
I'm sober now and you're the writer but really give them a try on the consciousness part, Zizek leans on them quite a lot too.
Joshua Watson
I have a hate love relationship with Zizek. I basically agree with him, but at the same time want to strangle him to death.
Samuel Parker
Lol fair enough
The ontological incompleteness isnt an admittance of the transhistoricity of capital unless we take marx's position that alienation is unique to capital which neither I nor zizek accept.
Lol we get into scraps on Twitter all the time
Ryder Edwards
Maybe I'll get a twitter account and shitpost with Mister Land too, I'm not a gommie but I'm quite madly obsessed with Bataille and Trakl and worse, it will be fun.
Jayden Clark
Forgot shitposting flag, but everything is shitposting anyway mein Gott. Anyway on alienation as process you should really read Anti-Oedipus, I agree with noone anyway but I think you've misrepresented Zizek's view on it, like I said it may all be lexicographic magic but you should read them, and Lyotard of course. Also I shill Asada a lot and you like the void too, so here's an article
newleftreview.org
Liam Baker
Wyatt Edwards
Alexander Price
If this is your particular misunderstanding you could have just as easily made the same accusation against Marx (Gotha Program). Yes, there are many instances of polemic appeals to (economic) 'justice' and 'equality' in TaNS but by no means should you read more into it than what it is meant as: an appeal to the common reader.
This is nonsense. You literally can't do this. Either the law of value is operative and determinant, or not. Labor vouchers aren't "imposing" the law of value.
This isn't a question of normativity. This is a question whether you accept the validity of the claims by Marx or don't and act upon them accordingly or don't. You either make direct and visible under socialism the real process that in a mystified and indirect way used to determine value under capitalism (labor time) – which is also the first step of overcoming the value form altogether – with vouchers, or your remain in the (to a different degree) mystified and indirect frameworks of your "alternatives" (gift economy, crypto, barter, simulated/pseudo-markets, imposed price controls, etc.) which fail on the long run, anyway.
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
Alexander Thomas
Why are radlibs obsessed with this term?
Owen Diaz
OP thanks for the article. Re: reinterpreting Shakespeare–what is it we're reinterpreting, though? Is it all just shifting sands above the material conditions (economic factors)? . If so, why bother reading anything by anyone else of the time, e g. the great playwright, tavern brawler, heretic and tobacco-user, Christopher Marlowe?
Graham Harman is mentioned in passing. He's really a (speculative) "realist", rather than an idealist. Pic related from an article by Harman on JSTOR . (free to read when you sign up for an account, or if you sign in with Google.) jstor.org
Hudson Myers
Julian Hill
Look at cockshotts blog posts on the law of value user, he openly admits that you would have to impose some artificial discipline on labor in a specific way such as judging labor against the minimum required for a given task so that the law of value will be preserved.
Cooper Stewart
Well Shakespeare is the most prominent example of it but its true for all literature really. The same basic story is the same, it calls out to us and when we accept it as relevant to us in particular we interpret it in a way that we need to for our own situation.
Harman, iirc, believes in object oriented ontology, and while interesting, I dont think the solution to humans loosing our privileged place of subjectivity is done by extending being to objects.
Charles Cruz
(not the other user)
I dont think that is true, comrade.
Firstly, the point you probably point towards is his point of comparing the productivity of a worker per labour hour, or a unit of workers per labour unit, to the avarage labour time, in order to sniff out out freeloaders, unreported/unnoticed errors and detect unreported productive increases. This is to ensure that no workers are paid a for work they did not do, its a simple metric of detecting fraud and irregularities. The "discipline" he talked about was the possibility of paying underperforming labourers less and overperforming labourers more, so as to not punish the hard working labourers for working hard or reward slackers for slacking off, mostly in relation to simple mechanical labour. (Psychologists have found that material incentive is only effective as a stimulant in simple mechanical labour, not anything involving even the slightest bit of mental labour). This in itself does not impose the law of value.
As for what you could, with a bit of a stretch, consider "the law of value" he tries to enforce, is the act of using the labour time as a metric to plan production. In this case, since we know the production cost of producing commodities, their transportation costs, etc etc, in labour time, we can compare these labourtimes to plan optimal production and distribution across the whole economy. Secondly, it could also be the act of trying to match the free floating prices on his consumer-goods quasi-"market" to the labour prices. Is this the law of value? I would argue it really is not, going against cockshott. The law of value is the emergent tendency of the mechanisms of capitalism itself, it is build into the system itself. In the labour voucher case, it is a deliberate choice, since if 2 comparable goods exist, one requiring twice as much labour as the first, we would prefer the cheaper one to be consumed rather than the expensive one (in terms of labour time) since it saves on how much society has to work. We would like for consumers to be able to choose the product they wish to consume while still enforcing a certain degree of pressure on people to pick the cheaper version.
Since this is a conscious choice and not a law of the systematic tendency of the production and distribution itself, we can choose to break it if we wish to, for whatever societally beneficial reason there might be. Therefore I dont think its a law of value, since we choose to do so, in order to ensure our production matches the optimal distribution in terms of labour time, and nothing is over or underproduced.
Camden Fisher
No thanks, I prefer reading his books, as opposed to OP, who's references consist of youtube links. Your article reeks of ignorance as has been pointed out. What is astonishing is how your ilk lacks the capacity to feel shame, really. Do you understand how many layers of ignorance you have to be under to even write such a thing:
???
If I were you I'd delete my blog completely having been proven a pseud, but not your ilk. It doesn't matter to you, does it?
William Sullivan
>The parsec is the most perfect example of this imperfect but still functional objectivity. It stands for parallax arcsecond and was perhaps most famously invoked in Star Wars: A New Hope by Han Solo, boasting that he made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs.
Given that it's a measure of distance and not time, the statement by Han Solo is nonsense. What does this bit about a fantasy movie have to do with socialism? What does anything you write here have to do with socialism? Will this even convince a single person on the fence to become a socialist?
Your grasp of any of these, except maybe popculture, is atrocious.
2 × 5.5 = 11
Given that in classical economics and Marx use values are heterogeneous and not some one-dimensional scale of happiness, there is nothing simple about use value.
Labor vouchers are for work done. Demand is monitored and used to rearrange how much work will be done on making this or that product, going over or under some limits in buffer stock can also trigger a price change, it doesn't change the income of individuals assigned to making this or that.
Your bourgie reasoning is upside down. Individuals will try to get good utility for the income they spend, whatever the price ratios of commodities are. That they act that way is compatible with any price ratios. As such it doesn't prove shit about how the price ratios come about. If Öcalan on his prison island gets a little shopping budget and there is a shop selling things to just him at prices proportional to the Scrabble values of the products' names, he'll try to make the best of this situation. If prices on crazy island are based on color and blue things cost twice as much as yellow things, he'll make the best of that situation. Doesn't prove that the prices show something sensible about how the products relate to each other (which is a spooky formulation to begin with).
>There is no coherent reading of Capital waiting for us out there.
There is no coherent reading of anything waiting for you with your brain's abilities. What is supposed to be the audience of your text and what is supposed to be its purpose? Is this exercise in huffing your own farts supposed to teach the working class anything? You aren't writing for us. The working class doesn't need nor want your shit. Stop writing "theory".
Matthew Thomas
You’ve been here a long time
Parker Adams
The average labor time is itself formed by the system which determines the distribution of outcomes. This is why technical analysis is bunk, it's putting explanatory power in the average itself instead of the economic system which determines stock prices. In order to get an average which is reduced when labor saving technology is introduced you must judge labor time of an individual worker against the minimum time required for production.
What's more, Cockshott insists not just on labor vouchers being rewarded in such a way, but ensuring that the social value of a given a good being determined by the labor time required. He critiqued Poland while it was under socialist control for overly subsidizing agricultural products for this reason.
Yes, this becomes a conscious choice (hence why I said it was being enforced on normative grounds), but I think Zizek's critique of alienation in Marx is especially prescient here. Alienation, like ideology, are transhistorical. They are necessary aspects of our subjectivity; capitalist alienation is only one particular outgrowth of alienation. Poland's choice was a conscious one too, but they were also ideological choices. Hence why genius's such as Kalecki were sidelined by the planning committee when he tried to impliment realistic growth goals.
It was a list of references, not a bibliography. All the books I talked about were mentioned explicitly: Incontinence of the Void, Philosophy of the Encounter, Capital, The Ego and Its Own, 1844 Manuscripts,
Nolan Phillips
Thats not the purpose of this essay. I'm just developing my own thoughts. I have, however, probably done more for that goal than most on this board.
The context of this is Godel's incompleteness theorum, you can only break 11 down by getting into the constiuent parts of a whole number, it's like saying you can reduce a name down to letters.
I'm not alleging that use value is the same as neoclassical utility.
You are describing Cockshott's interpretation of labor vouchers. The difficulty of them in general was discussed in Marx's critique of Proudhon, which Cockshott himself has reiterated. As for Cocksthott's scheme itself,
Lange's critique of Mise's economic calculation problem disagrees. In case you didn't get it, I'm not alleging that prices in the short term are determined by the relationship between people's preferences, as neoclassical economics does. Rather, with a fixed stock of goods for a day to sell, sellers will adjust prices to the market clearing level, thus making it determined by the quantity of goods and the demand for the good, thus the only objective relationship between the goods becomes their quantity.
Working class don't need theory. That's a part of the whole point I'm making. The ideology of the working class which expropriates the capitalists cannot be determined by communists. The only role for those aware of the material possibility of communism and who have placed their bet on it is to counter the counter-tendencies of reaciton.
Josiah Reyes
I was here almost from the beginning user.
Easton Lopez
Your thoughts must be good because you've spent a lot of time thinking? That's the mudpie-brain theory of use-value.
The point was that you had not specified your numbers as positive integers. That you didn't immediately get this tells me you must be really bad at math.
"In general"? No. If Marx had believed LVs to be a bad idea in general, he would not have written about them like he did in CotGP and the manuscript for Capital Volume 2 (end of chapter 18). They don't work in combination with decentralized production units making their own decisions and trading with each other. That's the point Marx (and Cockshott) made.
What I get is that you're an absolute brainlet barfing up crude and simple neoclassical (Lange) and Keynesian (Kalecki) ideas like they are brand new and clever ("genius" even) and you try to cover up your revisionism with some mathy le-quantum-Gödel-jazz-hands gesticulations you don't understand yourself and that make your text look like a pomo parody.
Carson White
In case your genius brain didn't get it, my work in converting people isn't related to my writing, it comes from my promotion of Zig Forums, the de-classcucking fb page, and my irl organizing.
As for the "value" of the essay itself, everything I wrote was done for the purpose of defending materialism as a theory.
It was obvious from the context, that you didn't immediately get this tells me you're really bad at reading.
I said "difficult" not "bad". I was also specifically replying to a claim Zizek made about neo-ricardians attempting to do just that. It should be noted, however, that the situation that Marx outlines in Capital that facilitates the use of labor vouchers in CotGP, the total monopolization of capitalism, has not occured. Thus we still live in a world with many decentralized produciton units.
Even Cockshott relies on Lange for a lot of his work.
The only revisionism I've done is disagree with Zizek's correct reading of commoditity fetishism, which has nothing to do with quantum phyics. Incidentally you don't seem to be disagreeing with any of that, probably because Zizek's use of value form theory is aligned with big Leftcom theorists. All you're doing is quibbling about the use of theories of price in the short term and labor vouchers, and not even making disagreements of substance. There's not one thing you've said which amounts to a real argument.
Connor Clark
fuckin DROPPED. go be a brainlet elsewhere
Nathaniel Peterson
t. idealist
Evan Perry
that word doesn’t mean what you think it means underage
Adrian Richardson
I'm only using the philosophical sense of the word
Asher Long
bump
Evan Diaz
The avarage labour tiem is determined by the material used in production and the poductivity of all workers, not a "system".
Explain
No. Not in any version of reality. To get an avarage, brace yourself, you avarage everything. Nothing about comparing it to "the minimum time". The speed at which hyperactive superworker 2000 is making a cookie, a microeconomic fact, tells us very little about large scale capabilities.
Yes. Which is both correct and what Marx put forth in critique of the gotha programme.
Sorry I only speak english as my second language, not jargon.
Which has something to do with cockshotts system because….?
Whats your point? That planned production and labour vouchers dont do away with alienation sufficiently? Or that cockshotts system demands too much growth (in which case you are wrong since cockshotts system does not do anything with economic growth, it just strives for a classical economic equilibrium within given material constraints).
Subsedising food, or anything, means that it will get bought at a rate higher than it can be supplied at. Or rather, it is bought at a rate, and usually you change the price so as to make it so you sell/distribute at a rate that you can produce. Subsedising products leads to empty shelves, or rather, it leads to the first people to come to the shop to get their share of the items, and for the latecomers to get nothing despite rightfully deserving to access it. This creates things like breadlines, and is totally unnecessary in all aspect. That is why subsidising of products without hard rationing is generally bad.
Im quite confused what your point even is, in normal, human english, without using vague, unmeaningfull phrases like "on normative grounds"
Jacob Long
(small addition on poland)
Note that poland had foodlines, despite having better and more food per person than some western countries. Nobody likes to stand in line, and lines for products make it seem like your system cannot adequately product enough shit for everyone, even if you in face, produce more.
Leo Jackson
Again, who is your audience? Yourself? You did that for yourself? Look, I do things for myself like when I'm taking a crap, I don't post the result online.
If disagreements about economics are not disagreements of substance to you, you must not grasp yourself what you are actually writing. You disagree with Cockshott where he is simply echoing Marx, so to disagree with Cockshott here means disagreeing with Marx. Do you prefer writing pop commentary? Then do that, and don't pretend you have anything to say on economics.
Hunter Edwards
The average labor time is as much a result of the methods you use to discipline labor as it is the result of the technical capabilities. In capitalism, external discipline is applied by competition and internal discipline is applied by managers.
The everything which creates the average is the distribution of all existing data. That distribution is determined by the system. Read Classical Econophysics or Laws of Chaos, they harp on this a lot. Cockshott brings up the minimum time not as a measurement of value, but as a necessary comparison of the existing labor time used in order to discipline labor. Otherwise the average would not decrease when technology improved.
The problem is that Cockshott is attempting to implimet conscious control at all. The polish planners didn't suffer from stupidity, their economists like Kalecki knew what subdizing agricluture meant. Do you know why they didn't impliment the law of value in the way Cockshott described? Because their planning was necessarily wrapped up in the state ideology.
Cockshott's mistake is thinking he can avoid ideology in economic planning through cybernetics and allowing direct democratic input within certain constraints. The historical reality is that ideology is inescapable.
It is not that labor vouchers and planned production do not get away from alienation sufficiently, it's that they get away from it at all. Alienation is a necessary part of our subjectivity, it constitutes our being. Conscious planning in a world that is not post-political, post-ideological, cannot help but break the law of value in ways that threaten the reproduction of the system.
lol does anyone need a reason for having a blog and wanting other people to read it?
Your previous "economic" disagreements have been nothing but whininng about how I'm not repeating your favorite thinkers uncritically, nothing about what the underlying issue is. Even Marx wasn't 100% correct. What we should take from him is his materialist philosophy, his economic understanding of capitalism. It's quite ironic that the hill you're willing to die isn't economics at all, it's marx's conception of alienation, and his belief that politics would be abolished with capitalism.
James Myers
That's a "problem" to you because your position is anti-communist.
You talking like this would be funny if you weren't so verbose. Do you understand that what you say doesn't amount to anything practically? You beat your chest and say something like WE NEVER CAN GET PERFECT INFORMATION AND PERFECTLY OBJECTIVE FACTS DUN-DUN-DUUUUUUUUUUUUN!!! – As if that were some mind-shattering theoretical breakthrough. Want a cookie for that achievement?
Translated into less pompous language it's simply this: "I am anti-communist."
You can't even roughly parse what they are saying.
Nothing of that sort is said or even hinted at in the post you ostensibly reply to.
Nolan Scott
My position is only to stand with the most liberating historical possibility.
Quite the opposite. In case you didn't notice this whole essay was done to defend the possibility of objectivity. The issue isn't knowing objective facts. This is easy. The problem is acting on them in a rational way.
Angel Butler
Conscious planning threatens the reproduction of the system is a maximally anti-communist position. You moderate that by putting a caveat there with in a world that is not post-political, post-ideological, which is about the mindset of people, so how an idealist would argue. Given that you also stated your disagreement with a belief that politics would be abolished with capitalism you mark the caveat as insurmountable, which brings your position back to the pure, maximally anti-communist one.
How does this not make you anti-communist?
Luis Campbell
Only if you consider communism to be an ideal which we must force society to conform to.
Those are not "mindsets". When you think you've escaped politics and ideology, it usually means that you're only deeper within them.
David Cook
What else would communism be than conscious planning, unconscious planning? Maybe you can give us the theory of unconscious communism, as you are already well-versed in unconscious writing.
Angel Barnes
communism is the real movement which abolishes the present state of things user
Parker Scott
For the past hundred years, this sentence has been the calling card of people whose buttocks can only be separated from the chairs they sit on by surgery.
Ryan Watson
no one's more opposed to leftcoms than me. this is hardly a call to inaction. join all the orgs, do all the protests. I sure did. If you don't know what's going to cause change, there's no reason not to try everything.
Jonathan Cook
Well, it stands to reason that an anti-communist would also be anti-leftcommunist.
Except taking the advice from Marx in CotGP…
Thomas Ortiz
make another post
Sebastian Green
Fuck no. OP has terminal narcissism.
Christian Gutierrez
here you user's go: bunkermundo.wordpress.com
A new post and one on economics