>Did you know that the most important and insightful Marxist current is the one founded on a misunderstanding of the word realisieren? Yeah, no. Repost time:
>If by latent value you mean technically necessary work time to produce a thing - it doesn't create it. And value in that sense is not some phenomenon of just a specific mode of producion, of course. Much confusion comes from the different meanings of value (I don't just mean to separate this from utility or use value, in Marx writings the term value doesn't even always correspond to just exchange value), and translating ambiguous terms like realisieren from German (can mean either making something a reality or getting awareness of something).
Julian Gomez
...
Luis Allen
no more abstract philosophical bullshit pls
Nicholas Powell
How are the Manifesto against Labor or the Anselm Jappe interview "abstract philosophical bullshit"…?
Hunter Diaz
Mate, this little bit of semantics is all that Wertkritik amounts to. To think that people put several decades of their lives into those "theoretical" journals and websites… But that's all that it is. They end up seeing value as being created in the circulation sphere and then wonder why everybody else but them is driving through Marxland on the wrong side of the road. Just read that post, think about if for a minute. Ask for clarifications if that post isn't clear enough for you.
Grayson Reyes
I don't see how what you stated change anything about the premises or the conclusion of the Manifesto against Labour.
Angel Powell
Whoa, they are against work. Have never heard of that position before. Wait a sec, my phone is ringing and the century before the last on is calling: marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/index.htm The "manifesto" by Krisis starts with the claim that everybody else except our enlightened Krisis gentlemen are obsessed with jobs, jobs, jobs. This is a strawman of course. The DGB campaigned for a five-day workweek in the 1950s (showing a kid with the slogan, "Samstag gehört Vati mir" - "Saturday, daddy belongs to me"). Unions have had campaigns for reducing work hours since forever. The union I am in right now at the workplace I am in right now wants to renegotiate contracts and one of the goals is more vacation days. In one region the bus drivers are on strike for shorter work time. The reason you don't recognize the strawman as such is that you are not familiar at all with the labour movement aside from how it is presented by fruity "theorists" like these.
Try reading the following NOT in the voiceo of the COMMUNISTGANGSTERCOMPUTERGOD guy. Pro-tip: You can't.
What's amusing is that this part of the text comes right after a long passage about fictional capital being extra-bad and leading to bubbles. Coherent arguments are not a thing the kriiiiisis-in-my-skin group are interested in.
They offer some not completely silly (but also kinda obvious) analysis of some hokey words in German that glorify work, like Trauerarbeit (grief-work). This only leaves a convincing impression if you don't stop and think for a minute whether these terms used to "prove" the all-encompassing work-glorifying culture are cherry-picked. And they are. Other common words and phrases paint a different picture. How about Feierabend, the standard German word for the after-work hours? Feier = celebration, Abend = evening.
The vision they offer in this long text is just mentioning councils and solar power in passing. They also hate nuclear power for some reason. If you want me to play shrink like they do when they diagnose the entire working class and all politicians ever with having a work fetish: I believe Krisis have a decentralization fetish and that this is a sub-conscious repetition of the free-market mantra that they haven't been able to shake off completely. And, this is the great thing about invoking psycho-babble analysis of sub-conscious processes: you can't ever disprove it.
Juan Sullivan
I'm too stupid for theory.
John Barnes
Mh, you make a valid point.
But didn't the demands for shorter workdays cease when the 8 hour laws were passed in the early 20th century, as if the "balance" had been "finally" struck?
I'll have to be honest, I have never heard of any unions in recent history fighting for significant decrease in working time. But maybe I'm just missing a part of history…
Evidence being what? I don't work longer hours than my grand parents. And I don't care about anybody here giving a rant about their personal lives as an answer to that. I want to know what the general trend is and I am pretty sure that people in 1950 worked longer hours than today.
Like Krisis, he pulls that "everybody but me is anti-semitic, or at risk of becoming one any minute" shit. Great non-sectarian attitude you got there.
Is the suicide number higher than a hundred years ago? And remember that outside of works of fiction, suicide is typically something old people do, and average lifespan has increased, so you should take that into account and look and compare e.g. suicide rates among 30-somethings today and then, 40-somethings today and then, and so on.
Asked what kind of social organization he advocates: There is the decentralization fetish again. Meh.
Noah Nelson
Perhaps this person is referring to how work has more effectively saturated people's lives? Technology allows work to invade a person's private life such that there is no clear divide between leisure and work? Of course that still sounds a bit melodramatic as it's really not the same as working 12 hours a day or more in some shitty factory but perhaps that's a somewhat more charitable reading. First non-sectarianism is trash, second I think the point is rather that in a sense Nazism was motivated by an attempt to improve capitalism on a personal level. To expropriate the greedy Joos and spread their wealth around so everyone else could get a bit more where as communism must be a restructuring of society. We cannot focus on just the 1% and inequality because it comes with the implication that the problem is "corporate capitalism" or whatever new-age liberal trash is popular now. The problem rather requires that we destroy capitalism in its entirety.
That's not the claim. The claim is that work-related suicide is up. I don't know enough to verify that and I'm too lazy too look it up but at least address the actual claim being made.
Carter Morgan
Nope. weltbild-verdi.blogspot.de/2015/04/125-jahre-1-mai-vom-kampftag-zum.html IG Metall und der Arbeitgeberverband Gesamtmetall vereinbarten 1957 die stufenweise Einführung der 40-Stunden-Woche. Ein Ergebnis, welches auch für andere Branchen wegweisend war. 1965 wird die 40-Stunden-Woche in der Druckindustrie, 1967 in der Metallindustrie per Tarifvertrag eingeführt. Nach siebenwöchigem Streik und Aussperrung erkämpfte die IG Metall 1984 den Einstieg in die 35-Stunden-Woche. Translation:
Jeremiah Foster
Reply to myself: The picture I posted above has words that mean 40 hours are enough - Confederation of German Trade Unions. Should have posted this one instead. In Germany, this picture of the happy sun and the number is a well-known thing. Iconic. This particular version got some words on it that mean the right step.
Lincoln Walker
The interesting thing about both claims is that they are very hard or even impossible to measure, compared with just work time and suicides. I mean, how do you know for sure that somebody killed himself because of work? That work has penetrated the private sphere seems like an evidently true statement. People are expected to read emails and receive phone calls from their employees in what is officially your free time too a much larger degree than 15 years ago. Sure. But how do you combine this with official work time and intensity of work at that time and obtain some reliable and uncontroversial measure of whether all these factors together are something more intense than what life was like 20 or 50 years ago?
I wonder if Jappe has done any sort of research regarding that, or maybe the complicated metrics implicit in his statements are complicated to cover up that he is talking out of his ass.
Has life in general become more stressful and intense during the last 50 years? I would expect a drop in the average lifespan then, so unless one comes up with a better measure, my answer is no.
Thomas Gray
That's fair. I've noticed artsy-academic communists have a tendency to do shit like that.
Easton Bell
lost my flag fug xd
Eli Price
Suicides do increase on average every year. Idk how you could prove even a portion of them are caused by work/work-related issues.
Jacob Robinson
The thing is, these achievements are clearly meek when compared with what could be boldly demanded. I mean, it took more than one goddamn century to see a decrease of 5 hours a week. The IWW demanded a fucking 16-hour workweek in the '30s, where did that go?
Andrew Carter
they 're not and i think they are interesting, but we need even more concrete stuff. what i really hate is how this jerk postone develops his ideas and theories, so boring and sterile.
Blake Mitchell
I'm interested in Wertkritik however I don't know much about it so I have a couple of questions
Is Wertkritik politically speaking left-communist & Debordian?
Is it anti-humanist?
I assume people involved in the WertKritik are also involved in the MEGA2 project?
Are they anti-Deutsche?
Liam Moore
It's usually associated with Left Communism, yes — with significant influences from the Frankfurt School. Anselm Jappe wrote an essay on Guy Debord and Debord himself loved it.
They don't really deal with that specific question all that much — not that I know of.
I didn't know about MEGA2. Sounds interesting though.
Some of them are, like Robert Kurz.
Gavin Lopez
>The thing is, these achievements are clearly meek when compared with what could be boldly demanded. No, that's not the thing. You are moving goal posts. Re-read . Quoting from the Krisis manifesto:
>This is a strawman of course. The DGB campaigned for a five-day workweek in the 1950s (showing a kid with the slogan, "Samstag gehört Vati mir" - "Saturday, daddy belongs to me"). Unions have had campaigns for reducing work hours since forever. The union I am in right now at the workplace I am in right now wants to renegotiate contracts and one of the goals is more vacation days. In one region the bus drivers are on strike for shorter work time. The reason you don't recognize the strawman as such is that you are not familiar at all with the labour movement aside from how it is presented by fruity "theorists" like these.
James Gutierrez
I think his point stands. The lack of major decrease in working hours point to an overall hesitation to demand emancipation from work. The 5-hour decrease we've seen over the last century is way too modest to be considered a call into question of labor itself.
Caleb Peterson
Still trying to move the goalposts I see. The text by Krisis talks about an obsession that everybody should work, work, work. And that everybody is part of that jobs-jobs-jobs cult, including all political currents and trade unions. When you look at what trade unions actually do, and not the most brave or radical ones even, but utterly generic ones, you will see that more free time is an utterly generic and common demand.
Now you talk about failure to achieve enough in that department as proof of whatever. What enough is is of course left undefined, another slider you can adjust in light of evidence you haven't bothered to look up yet.
Jack Butler
Where did they invoke psychoanalysis?
David Evans
Dear aspie, playing shrink was a reference to their style of arguing. The validity of much of what they say hinges on whether people think what they say they think. That is, it is an "analysis" (=wild-ass speculation) about what is going on inside people's heads.
On the USSR: Under capitalism, socially necessary labor time is figured out ex-post. But that doesn't imply that snlt can only ever be figured out ex post in any society.
This is a very long-winded equivocation and pretty much the same sort appears also in the Krisis text. Maybe you fell asleep halfway through it, so in case you missed it, here is what these frauds are doing: They point out that labor has several connotations, some very negative (slavery). They chide those who don't use the term in the most negative way. You are using the term wrong (even though everybody understands what you mean by it, including us). Then they say, you can't criticize capitalism from the perspective of defending labor in its most terrible sense, since that is part of capitalism. But that's not something I've ever heard anyone do. It is absolutely normal to criticize capitalism from a point of view that does not acknowledge certain work as useful even though it counts according to capitalism's standard. Case in point: advertising.
Ridiculous on its face. Makes me wonder whether OP even read that far before posting the link.
And this statement is structurally anti-semitic. Oh, wait, Trenkle is part of the hip in-group of Krisis, so it isn't anti-semitic.
>Not a few persons, under these difficult circumstances, dream of a new class unity in accordance with the concepts of traditional Marxism and the workers movement. These concepts, however, have not only revealed their nature as forces of domination in the twentieth century (principal contradiction vs. secondary contradictions, vanguard, party hierarchies, etc.), but today they do not even have a material basis This is fucking retarded.
This is not theory. OP, thanks for all this utterly useless waffling. Is there any other text you want me to read?
Alexander Perez
Just another thing about the emptiness and douchiness of the "theory" of Robert Kurz. He said: This is wrong-headed on two levels: 1. David Zachariah, Paul Cockshott, Anwar Shaikh claim to have empirical evidence for labor time being good at predicting prices (doesn't apply to oil or big pharma, of course). 2. Suppose for the sake of argument that point 1 were not true. Why on earth should you care so much about what life is like under capitalism as a standard for what you want under socialism? I'm not saying, "Let's always do the opposite of how it's like under capitalism." But I'm certainly not saying either is to do everything the way we do it under capitalism. Doesn't make sense.
