Zizek: LTV

Can't upload .epub and some ISPs block libgen.
libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=DE50A7EC9C9F2D4B7A677D5344C77E7C

Found .pdf version.

dankon kara amiko

tl.dr

t. ☭TANKIE☭

It's clearly a massive Holla Forums raid. They know Zizek is very valuable to the left, and will do anything to get rid of him.
They want us instead to support leftists that are as braindead (or dishonest, who the fuck knows anymore) and annoying as Peterson so they don't have to compete with us in intellect or likability.

...

I'm not sure about that. The context in Capital is that of production. Here's Harvey's full quote:

Peterson?

He's this "le Kermit the frog Jungian anti-postmodernist meme man" who got popular on the alt-right for whining about "muh postmodernist boogeyman".

Okay, was just confused cause the dude called him a leftist.

I really wonder what Cockshot fans would say to the second half of this.

I wasn't calling him a leftist. he's just an example of an unlikable "acadamic" who knows jack shit.
Zizek is the complete opposite of that, and it triggers the alt-reich

But I am.
is to be found in Capital. Reading Harvey to figure out what Harvey's opinion is what Marx meant is better than going by what Zizek thinks Harvey meant, but it's best to always get as close to the source as possible, surely your question is about what Marx meant, so here is Capital by Marx.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
There is a footnote right at the end of the sentence, clarifying that he is talking there about "the value of the commodity in which that labour time is materialised". He is talking about what shit exchanges for above that passage, and he talks about what shit exchanges for below that passage. And he doesn't refer to the experience of experts, he doesn't say experience of experts in business/Hegel/whatever experts shows the reduction, just experience shows… Meaning, it's something a random person reading it should know from experience. What else could he possibly have meant.

Look, I read Capital and I first found it rather tedious and repetitive, Marx goes and on that if the value of X units of foo = Y units of bar, Not only do Y units of foo exchange for Y units of bar, but also, get this: When you read it right to left, it also means that Y unit of bar *breathes* exchange for X amount of foo, dude!! And at first it made me roll my eyes. Yes, Karl, that's how an equal sign works. That's what the market does. And Marx repeatedly points at it to crack the thing open and to get you to actually think about it. We can argue about whether the how of this reduction by capitalism and the market is described well by Marx, but it's absurd to have a debate whether the reduction happens in the real world. It's not an invention by Marx.

In another chapter (marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm), Marx talks about the education that goes into skilled labour requiring work and so that education being an ingredient to the products that require that skilled labour, so that the labour adds more value to the product, analogous to how fixed capital adds value (and just like Cockshott and Cottrell later handle the prices of products that require skilled labour in TANS):

Put your meme philosopher aside and read Marx for a change.

When I said context in Capital I meant the context in Capital.

But then you are clearly wrong. The paragraph's first sentence states that we'll be looking at production with no concern to its usefulness, its 'special form,' i.e. production as mere physical phenomenon. Hence the following passage about the "productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles," hence comparing with a simile this "mere human labour's" relation with "human labor in general" (represented in a commodity) to the productive role of the simple man and the banker. Then he moves on to talk about labor power as potentiality ("exists in the organism") and only after these conceptual steps were taken can he talk about how larger quantities of simple labor can add up to a smaller quantity of skilled labor.

The question about whose experience Marx talks about is justified by the development of the passage. It is clearly not yet "market experience," and not just the "everyday experience of the reader" (we've gone down to the level of human organisms, for crying out loud). We are at the conceptual level of labor as mere physical activity, deprived of considering personal or social usefulness. The text is far from talking about the interconnected concepts of commodities, markets, wages – even the footnote hints at this "Wages is a category that, as yet, has no existence at the present stage of our investigation." – and your approach tries to insert complex categories into the text that are not yet developed and are clearly not on the same conceptual level of labor Marx is.

Very constructive, thank you. Your expertise is much appreciated.

You have to read more than one paragraph in one go, and stop trying to read sentences as entirely self-contained in meaning.
>even the footnote hints at this "Wages is a category that, as yet, has no existence at the present stage of our investigation." – and your approach tries to insert complex categories into the text that are not yet developed and are clearly not on the same conceptual level of labor Marx is.
The topic is Capital, not a sentence or two, and the issue you put in bold here is exactly why the excerpt from another chapter was provided. Do you even have an alternative hypothesis what experience could possibly relate to?

Typical.

Dear OP,

if you just read the first chapter until
you will see that Marx already mentioned exchange value before the passage you have trouble parsing and he wrote that a certain quantity of a product gets equated to a quantity of another in the market:
>The proportions in which they are exchangeable, whatever those proportions may be, can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron…
But you claim in

...

You got some issues, man.

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(quoting Žižek)
I think Žižek misconstrues the position of oldschool Marxists here (though, since he hasn't named names here, he can weasel out of being proven guilty beyond doubt when it comes to that particular falsehood). Their point isn't let's look inside of the commodity to find out what it's Really Worth(TM), their point is that you shouldn't over-emphasize markets. Since you don't need capitalism or markets to arrive at a relational notion of cost and benefit of an object, opposition to capitalism or markets (even markets in the very limited sense as in the TaNS proposal) does not imply that you can't have a relational notion of that.

Žižek has trouble with thinking about objective facts existing in production if they don't also exist literally inside the products, like the steel in a car (which leads to doubt about how powerful the LTV really is). But of course, there is more than that to the objective side, it isn't just that and the rest being feelings or history or policy or what you want to call it. Some production processes require intense heat. This heat can come from electricity. This electricity can come from solar panels or a nuclear power plant or some other source, and you won't see the type of source in the molecules of the objects made with that heat. Of course, Marx doesn't mention nuclear power, but he does point out this type of objective relations that exist in production in the first volume of Capital (which OP hasn't read).

Cockshott. I guess you mean this part:

… minus some deductions for a buffer, for children, the elderly, healthcare, a (hopefully) expanding part of social consumption, and for research and expanding production is what Marx himself advocated for, see his remark on Owen's "money" in (sigh) Capital Volume One as well as Critique of the Gotha Program. What Marx criticized wasn't labour vouchers in themselves regardless of the system around them, but the feasibility of the combination of fixed administrative prices with decentralized management of production.

You want to have a discussion how a proposal of a book you haven't read relates to another book that you haven't read? Well, I have read both and here is my impression of the text you posted: Posing in the garb of the radical, the author vomits out "thought" that starts with echoing the totalitarianism doctrine of hysterical liberals ("Marx’s technocratic vision of Communism", "asocial character of labor"), one tangent "leads" to another, quotations are tortured in tangentception until they confess, and then it fizzles out in lethargic randomness.

You are conflating (again) the social form of a commodity (value) with its physicality (resource input, utility) and thereby – quite comically – provide an example of Zizek's critique. Nobody denies that steel and electricity needs to "go into" a car's production (an absurd premise you attribute to Zizek and debunk vigilantly).

really? Is not every production process by definition social?

So let's pin this down, Robinson Crusoe: is there a dimension of work outside the social?

OP, conversations require some common ground. Would you mind answering some simple questions:
You have read Capital: y() n()
You haver read Towards a New Socialism: y() n()
Did Marx consider Owen's labour-time notes as money: y() n()

Who is talking about utility? The utility an object has to a person is not intrinsic to it as a fixed quality irrespective of the situation the particular person is in and as such not really something completely separate from it and entirely due to its physicality, e. g. the usefulness of telephone technology depends on other people having it. Marx mentions the historical dimension (his magnet example), and even an isolated person on an island doesn't relate to the surroundings in such a simple way that things available in multiple units that bring him happiness (e. g. some fruit) can be equated with a quantity of them, such that X times as many units would simply amount to X times as much satisfaction (I'm referring to the idea of marginal utility usually not being constant, but diminishing).
When someone states a banality as a critique, the point is virtually never that the other person doesn't know that, it's rather that the other person hasn't taken it fully into account.
Look at the Marx quote again: "…it is the everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase." The claim by Marx is not that labour is in some spooky twilight zone outside of the social dimension and historicity, it is rather that an aspect of it is invariant.

Bump. Where are you, OP?

So, to wrap things up, the part with "experience shows that…" can be interpreted to refer to market exchange. If you put in market exchange there the sentences make sense and the statement also happens to be factually correct. And it's exactly the kind of statement Marx wouldn't dwell on much, given how bleedingly obvious it is. What else could "experience" there possibly relate to, OP?

The only other possible candidate here I can think of is division of tasks, but that is a very distinct second compared to market exchange. First, the argument for the interpretation putting division of tasks here: Marx goes from the abstract to the concrete, he starts in the most general way. Division of tasks is older than market exchange, it will also exist after, so it is the more general concept.

Now, the argument against: The way work is reckoned about in a manufacture keeps the different types of work more separate than what the comparison by the market does. Within the manufacture most pairs of distinct activities are reckoned about as not being substitutes at all, whereas in the market everything is compared in terms of money, meaning: made equal just by the quantities being right. In a factory distinct groups of workers do distinct activities, distinct steps in the production of a thing, and the overall performance tends to be set by the bottleneck, the weakest link; so, doubling the amount of workers at some step that is not the bottleneck is very unlikely to have any positive effect. So you don't have that equalization in terms of setting some quantities of activity A and B as equal to another, as it happens in the market.

lol wtf happened?

Wrong, everyone gets the blade of ruthless critique, whether it's sniff man, neck massage man, computer man, the bearded brothers, or google man.

V I V E
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DROPPIN' THE BLADE!

Shut the fuck up you western liberal buji college cocksucker, zizek is fucking garbage, a limited hangout that has nothing to offer outside of intellectual masturbation, taking ziz seriously is the biggest indicator that you are a LARPing fag that will probably be a liability when the revolution comes, you are a useful idiot that doesnt understand controlled opposition at best

mandatory ☭TANKIE☭ read on this fucking collaborator:

alphonsevanworden.tumblr.com/post/146430343445/the-protocols-of-the-learned-lacanian-of

There has been a major infiltrator of anti-Zizek nerds over the last few months. Shan't be taking seriously.

I will infiltrate your ass faggot,

N A Z B O L G A N G

has already begun the trial on ziz for abetting the Albion-Sionista Unipolar Order, it is only a matter of time until he is judged