Notes on Marx and Dickens

or to put it one last way

2009-07-25T03:03:00.000-07:00

Marx was s right about machines and humans, force and society, nature and culture, communism and identity, the fate of democracy, the position of healthcare... All the contours of modernity are there is Das Captial. The trouble was that Marx envisaged that these parts could only be created through one specific historical process, and failed to see that there might be many other routes to get here - for this one must surely blame Hegel.

Our problem is then we are at Marx's communist state (or have all the ingredient for it) but without any hope of actually ever reaching it.

Oh well!

Or better

2009-07-24T23:13:00.000-07:00

Or perhaps the problem is that capitalism has one thing really going for it. It uses the one passion which is capable of annexing a system and making it appear to be all about itself. That is greed is always there, always available and always able to annex or pull thoughts towards itself. We are caught them in the capitalism system because at one point or in one level a passion of greed can be generated powerful enough to annex all the disperate (and actually distinct) motive of capitalism and articulate them or claim to articulate them within a single desire (we are all greedy). It power is not then one of explication. It explains nothing. nor is it the single system which coordinated other as it does not really coordinate anything. It is merely a name for a devouring passion which is adequate to contain everything (in some sense).

That is one can if one really want to call everything greed. Dickens and Marx would rather one did not and could point to a thousand times one does not act this way, but that is no matter. One always can.

Self consciousness then sucks.

It becomes merely point at which a single passion can contain all the rest, and can be understood as such. it does not explain anything. But is sterile. It does not really even contain everything, as such that is as a powerful force. the action themselves were not greedy as such (or where not just about greed) and yet greed will claim them none the less, and be right to do so.

The problem then is how to find the equivalent force in the mind to such a greed. How then can one find a passion which can at a pinch contain or endeavour or annex all the others?

Or perhaps the real problem here is how can one avoid this passion not being fear? For greed is at least better than particular passion!

There is a rub indeed.

What is more

2009-07-24T22:40:00.000-07:00

Or perhaps the problem is that desire its will shift its nature. Desire will itself be translated into a force. It becomes impersonal to the human desiring, and does so in two ways.

On the one hand the desire will echo across the machine or web, hooking up other individuals and creating other circumstances. The manifestation of the desires, of the flicker of a glance will then echo into other flickers and be partially articulated by them collective curiosity will have its on physical presence, as will whittering. It will be their embodied in the world, a terrible impersonal, mundane idiotic thing. Desire then stops being only a thing n the human brain, it become articulated in the world, it becomes akin to a physical force. A mind which uses a rigmarole of machine and human to articulate itself. Humans become then a mere cell in a wider collective series of feelings.

These feelings will then as a physical force look to a power. Or better they will be viable ( as a physical force is ) to be plugged into machines and so become powerful. They will therefore really matter as such.

On the other hand, individual humans and there action as people (and there embodiment as government) are likely to slip out of view. They matte hardly at all. They matter not even to the government. All after all the governing classes need is to preach to the desires and cobble together a loose coalition of desire once every four years or so and so be elected. The actual individual humans as humans thereby create for themselves and in their freedom a new way to be powerless.

This might not matter (marx did suggests that communist man is all things at different times,a and perhaps this ism what he meant). And yet the trouble is that in the Marxian system there at least existed a something, a communism, a self-consciousness perhaps or echoing of consciousness that this was what was happening,and an understanding which define the collective mind the sharing of the conscious (as if the whole was an individual) which could capture the process. But there is no real need for this holding function Dickens suggests. If government is merely yet another desire, how will this idea of an idea in all minds form? Where can it hold from? if will merely slip into a desire for itself. It will then becomes a part of the system of shards. That shard (call it identity or bureaucracy or global consciousness) which allows for all the others and yet is a merely a part in the system.

Communism would then falter as its definition would merely be caught in the system. or to put it differently communisms has a change if it is the paradigm within which the shattering of human perception into thought is enacted self consciously and in the name of revolution. But its self consciousness follows on then it will merley be born devoured within the system it means to critique: this is Dickens notes the normal way and has been since the days of Spinoza and Leibniz) which self consciousness if understood.

What made Marx then think it can be so different this time?

The answer of course must be Hegel... that is the idea that history or across history a people or collective mind learns and learns for all of time. The realisation then that the mind is making its own world or the communist that they were the agents for a desire ought be enough to contain a system for all of time. Dickens however doubts this. The point is rather that every generation will need to learn for itself. Self consciousnes said then not carried forward tot he next generation. The problem is them that it becomes (like feminism or perhaps ecology) a player in a system it was once designed to contain. Real politik then needs to live with this fact. That is with the fact that whatever 'communist' systems we devise will ultimately fall into the system that analyse.

passion machines

2009-07-24T22:25:00.000-07:00

At which point Dickens has hit the real problem in Marx.

His great theory is undoubtedly the theory of the machine: a theory that takes a human and break them into parts, thereby converting humanity understood as the worker into the machine.

Great dickens thought. That is clear enough.

however why stop here?

Why only have machines and worker: humanity and machines?

Surely the real problem with every such system comes when humanity breaks not its action but its desires into machines.

That is they plug as consumers or novel readers their feelings into a whirlygig or apparatus the collapses what they are across a kalidescope of inter related feelings.

This kalediscope of course max called ideology. This is all very well, thinks Dickens, but it rather downplays the power of this element. Ideology is not simple as simple as such an opiate, or at least it is not when in a machine. There the echoes and wispher and images of the machine of collective warping quasi-technological imagination is enough to breed a monster.

A monster where thoughts and feelings slip into other people. They become even those one have never met ciphers or wraps for feelings. The images one has of then (real or imagined) promote desire.

More than that a competent machine if it is large enough will take the echoing other thoughts that make a mind; You know all the I wonder what happened to them or to that or I wonder what and where there are w and animate them. One thereby becomes caught up in ones own past or other pasts in many many strands of identity, any differentating desires which pull one everywhere and make holding anything down.

These desires might do things. Across our hopes is animated together we might make a thing. And yet That thing need not be good or revelant or anythin much. It might be a fantasy or merely a marketing opportunity.

The engraved worker

2009-07-17T21:43:00.000-07:00

machines are macabre things; One the one hand Max is very clear all machine reanimate dead labour. The power of nature then sweeps up old ideas and work done in building the machine and makes it live again. The dead worker, the social man who constructed the machine or all the humans who made it (by palling, by designing the tools etc) life again in the machines force. electricity re-animates labour.

On the other hand a machine is a natural vortex. It is the point at which nature breaks into society. That is the point where the forces of nature are in their boundless power transfigured into society and made to resonate across the social. The world activities of tool and handicraft are then swept up into the machine, and becomes caught up in animating natural forces.

likewise the demands goes out or at least the possibility that humans respond: that is hat humans loose any humanity and become as natural force in the system.What they are to the machine, they need to be 24-7 ( A very Marxist idea). A machine knows and cares not for tim, and it would if it could demand that workers care not for it to.

Here of course the second thread of capitalist machine kicks in. The capitalists machine is a machine for creating value and money for the capitalist . Machines might then in themselves distill natural force, but they do in the name of making money. Every force is the priced in capitalism. O better it s open to a price. But here there is a tension for the price of using nature is a price that is very different to the price for using workers. Workers must be kept alive (and cannot therefore be worked to death, or at least not before they have reproduced and trained their replacements). The same cannot be said for machines.A machine needs to be worked as hard as possible and as intensively as possible so that it repays as soon as possible the huge cost of building it.

That is the costs of the conjuring up of forces of nature by the capitalist, ensures that he must use those forces to the maximum of their power as soon as possible. The logic is therefore that he treats or tries to treat as much as possible his workers as if they too were a natural force. Or better as is how they did in the machines were a force that can as forces of nature be called upon on tap. On turns of the workers and they do whatever they do right away, and for as long as possible. Work is then turned into an unskilled task, and everyone must do. Everyone is caught up in its resonance and bound to it. Everyone is a part of the machine.

The trimuph of capitalism then lies in the fact that nature is transfigured into society via the machine(the window on the natural). Going the opposite way society is transfigured into something akin to a natural law. The law o profit which gathers all endeavours up an articulates them one onto the other, so that they form one great wave, which then rips across the wold, is the order of the day to the capitalism. Everything needs to go some where else (value profit); everything needs to expand and change. Soceity is bound by the iron rules of this change beyond everyone moment or element or person in it. it is the iron law as of growth.

The worker is then the individual caught n the middle of these transfiguration: They are the element upon which the weight of the transfiguration fill. They transfigure the natural order by becoming themselves as if they were in the grip of a force of nature, with all the profound discomfort and horror that brings. While at the same time they embody the unit which the capitalist drives forward in their schemes, the until they reckon on and count on in their alchemy that is the unit which can itself be change (make to worker harder, longer more intensively etc) so that profits follow.

The worker is then both the point at which natural forces tumble into the world, but also the world of work itself becomes akin to natural force. That is the point society is carried over into a certain set of iron rules, and the point at which force from beyond becomes a part in society. it is the double fact, the world of nature and the world of man that grows untrammeled that gives Marx hope. if only the worker can step back, and took a their position, if only the can understand their role in the system, and see this double alchemy (and not merely be swept along in the profit of it all), then they have great power.

Maybe he wonders perpetually they have the power to echo human society into other laws f growth (thoughts), and so free it form money. Maybe they have the power to make those open natural forces work for humanity in other ways, that this profit.

Well maybe.. The problem of course is that captialism would alwways rather not know

disembodiment

2009-07-16T23:39:00.000-07:00

The is really this double one.

One the one hand one has a system that pulverizes all individuality. An individual and their acs of perception, there ability to notice or to pull a lever is then caught within an entire process. The human is lost, in the system that require the brain and its eye to act and act and act and ac again and again and in the same way.

humanity is then merely another regulator, and other cogs another process:It is important as it is cheap. This process then having no end. That is the machines as they use the powers of nature for production, as they turn nature into a prodictive force pulervize humanity within something greater, and will ontinue to do so in differing ways as ones abilty to us nature differently increases.

To be a human will increasingly to become spread across many different things or pot or elements. One repeats this the action and again and agian in many different ways, and without any control Humanity is perpetually exploded into their own ever exploding machines; it is merely the echo of the echo.

At the same time regulation conjures up a state that wants to own all these differences and force them this way or that. A state therefore wants to be yet another force in the process, which wraps up production and drives it on way and not the other.It wants then to be akin to steam - a driving element or at least a point which warps the system elsewhere.

In effect the bureaucracy forget as sure as nature does the workers. They are then merely the elements regulated as they are the agents in a production, A series of figures to be worried at in either case: It is this element,t he minds of the people caught in the machines, Marx wants to remind us of. We wants to free this power of conception lost within the prison of limited perception; and if one can he thinks one has a world to gain...

If only we knew how!

But Marx counters

2009-07-16T23:02:00.000-07:00

The problem real problem of all capitalism is hat one always has to regulate it. Capitalism is the system that will make very act of slavery appear necessary.

Take child labour: of course it is wrong we might say, but to regulate it is to supress the poor.

Take green policies, of course the plant ought not to suffer, but we cannot hurt the poor.

Take healthcare; of course it is good bit...

Everything good is then opened on a complexity which always drags it elsewhere, and makes it (from another angle) appear bad or excessive l.

The power of capitalism is the power of this relavity. That is, it enslaves the world be injecting a little bit of supposed freedom into the world (there are poor families that need the money from child who works 14 hours a day), and so justify a whole policy of oppression.

F0r Marx with justification is then hollow. it is a mere apology.

And yet for us? it is clearly more complex. The problem and the joy of capitalism is that it endlessly constructs extra consequences. It manufactures ways and oddities that people adopt a system or behave differently in it. It creates a system rich enough for many many world to function in it (plastic bags are useful even is they do not degrade). It therefore force a system on the world where there are no simple solution. And yet and this is the nightmare of Marx, this system then creates oddities and horrors within it. Child labour is abhorrent, but so is flooding Bangledesh or destroying the rain forests... That is the nightmare that all this good all these nice little outcomes, mixed this all this horrors are in fact together creating a greater horror an abyss to which the entire whole of running. Or better that the worry is always that one of the bad element in the system (as population) i starting to spread across the whole. The dynamic of the unforseen is then ripping across what we are, spread out, and disrupting, destroying.

The worry is then that the unregulated is very likely to destroy and not constructively. it might simply destroy.

The ability of the system therefore to manufacture nice little goods within the whole is dear bought.

The problem is though Marx (who knows his Dickens) how to regulate this act, without blinding oneself in that other horror of circumlocution?

That is how to stop the system disrupting itself and ultimately destroying all it creates , while all the while keep it productive?

This is the challenge of the modern revolutionary,- they challenge to find a poetry for such a change a challenge we have yet to fully understand...

The law of circumlocution

2009-07-16T22:42:00.000-07:00

To regulate a state is the same Dickens suggests as to immobilize it.

How can it be different

IfI want to ensure that everyone is dong exactly what I want them to be, and when I want it, I have to interfere, I have to change, I have the ensure. Regulation or policing or monitoring is the scourge of the system. Or better it changes where the power of the system lies. it does not lies in the ability to do, so much as the ability to interfere. The problem then being that there is no logic or rhyme or reason to this interference. :Once one starts how would one very really stop?

The power of the interference is untrammled, in that it are the front line of converting humanity into regulation. What they regulate then goes. One might regulate the regulators to infinity (and so catch those regulation in other powers) but still not break the power of this initial throw. That is the initial demand that the world comforms to the rule book

To circumlocute is then to demand this of the world. A world stops being allowed to be what it would otherwise be, it becomes rather the necessarily products of forms. However of course at this point the regulators hit that problem that to force the world into the world of rules forces the rules to change in use (an never have the effect one wanted) as much as it changes the world. one is then faced with a hybrid of rules in the world. The only response of course of the good regulators is to invent new rules, new hybrid, and then new rues.

The entire enterprise therefore collapses into a sequence of hybrids and rues to regulate them.

It collapses into an utter bureaucracy beyond any possibility or sense.

It becomes utterly circumlocuted.

The real problem is then that the world inhabit the circumlocution of it. It becomes what it is thought then warping their nature as they try to control it. A zombie life form neither alive nor dead, living or regulation, one destined to bleed from the page into the world, and yet never loose the stigma of the back and white of the books pages....

so what is a machine?

2009-07-08T23:27:00.000-07:00

The prime difference therefore between the tool and machine lie in the fact that in the former a skilled human operates to use the tool to effect some task, while in the later, there is no skilled labour at ll, that is all carried out by the machine, all the worker does it power and supervise. A human is therefore the fodder , the power which drives the machine (pedals, or stocking up the boiler) and the eye that regulates. Nothing about the, not their education or the families matters, There are a mere muscle and and eye, an can always be reacted by such. They need make little or no excutive decision, they are merely following a siere of tasks, or watching for a set number of things. All nnvdiaivaulity and cetainy all skill is theroefr stripped out of the human altogether.

This move has at least 2 immediate effects, and one assumption

i) the relationship between a worker and their job is challenged. On the one hand they cannot own it, or value themselves for it at all. There is no value in what they do a machine or performing monkey can do. on the other hand jobs ceases really to be a singular task The worker who enact it, and hook into it, the eyes, and the muscles are not people, Their effect is therefore not really in the here and now of their tasks, but rather eddies across the entire process. A worker might loose their own value,and yet as a part in a system, a part whose action reflect the entire, who knows what values lie there?

2) the relationship between the mind and the product change. A machine in a sense reveals thought in the process of being thought. A task of the mind is broken down and aped into a series of separate tasks, a series of occupations. to think is then built into the reacting, the skilled machine. Thoughts become a thing to build within the world. Though is therefore not merely judged in the effects it has upon the world, it is directly represented in a series of machines, all of which represent some ones thought at some point, somewhere in the system.

Together then these two might be enough to build a different human: One hat needs not value their own task,and feel themselves gathered into a greater domain of thinking.

And yet there is a draw back: The assumption in all of this is that such thoughts are possible. that is that there can be a machine which gathers all live into it, as a series of routine mechanic tasks Maybe humanity is not quite so simply dissolved into a great machinic brain? Maybe individual process of reacting and responding, of skill always still matter: Maybe then thought will not go away so readily. If this is the case then one might never reach the utopia of communisms, and might be stuck in the partial dystopia of skilled labour...

more ways of killing the cat

2009-07-08T22:45:00.001-07:00

The point Marx says of this all is that the worker is killed twice. That is their sprit is broken in very different ways by capitalism.

The first stage is he world of manufactoring. Manufactoring industry break up an entire task into a series of mindless occupation. the occupation, may or may not be skilled. and are carried out be separate individuals. Humanity becomes then a part , a cog in a living machine, with nothing beyond that mechanic life. humanity is the cripples into place. That is, their education, and the life squeezes them into that cogs they are now going to be. They become useful in being a cripple, in being fit only for a single simple task.

what is more the logic of any captalisms system is that it genuinely squeezes he folk within it into place. they must be trained and paid for it. The system therefore is one of rigid heirarchy and protection. Each role is specially designed and protected. little deaths of little humanity pockmark the system therefore.

This is the the dystopia we all know so well, in the the Moon of First men in the Moon or the world of Ghormenghast: The world of the mechanic human. A World capitalism revists all the time: that is any time when there exists production processes where not any one could do it. The minute this happens little bubbles of pride and skill enter into a certain element of the system. Those 'skilled' workers become protective and proud of the limited disposition or skill. they start to protect their position, they start to despize others, then start to give themselves airs. Marx's point is that these airs and graces are distinctly defined and bound. They individual only have a pride in being a part of a system; that pride might be great, but the cost of crippling a mind so that it is only defined within a single series of tasks is greater yet. The richness of life is lost in the self importance of an occupation.

Be this as it may, this position of skilled worker within a system, trained p to a single task and protective of it (and only valued from it, though the job) clearly remains a deep element within capitalism.

Marx sees his great discovery as the alternative pole in capitalism. A machine utterly de skills. Anyone can do anything. This is the great maxim of the machine We are all theater directors now...The old worlds of skill are swept aside then in technological know how. The effect then on a humanity used to the protection and bonding on skill is then unmeasurable, Marx suggests.

In the immediate circumstance that effect is horrific. individual lives do not matter, and capitalism becomes then utterly blind to them. The world of capitalism plugs its workers into a machines, burns up their lives and then takes up another worker and does the same. If their is not need to train a work force, and no need to organize it beyond what a whip or starvation can and will do, then running the system is easy, and profits and lives are cheap.

And yet beyond this tyranny is that elusive of men, those who live in the communist sate. After all the old order of minds that were locked into certain jobs is now gone, but not utterly destroyed Humanity will still value itself in occupations, and yet that occupation is the factory could be doing anything or being anything. Pulling levers, pressing buttons, gives a flexible power. Moreover the rules that separate one from ones fellows are clearly broken down. One is no longer an occupier of a certain profession. , on is merely one pari of hands and eyes in a long and complex process: Ones action here and now echo across the that entire process, mingle with others, become one with others. To be a single human then is eroded in the machanic process. one eddies across others and through differing apparatus of the world.

One perhaps becomes communists.

well maybe.

What is clear is where Max is correct in his prediction, and where there is a hitch.

The first two of these two arguments are predictive. Humanity is oddly skilled and oddly values in a system of skilled workers in the workshop. Humanity is likewise utterly devalued in a mass production process. The trouble comes that the way government fight the latter is to impose the former (that is to create workers rights and treat all jobs as if they were skilled). No socalist government has then really been able to wrap their heads around what the final stage, what the path to communisms might look like. We simply do not know what kinds of minds are being born for there. They might well be everywhere, and yet us brutal socalists of the now might suppress them. Who knows?

The problem is then what does the socialisms consciousness within the machine, the sharing of that social labour look like to us? A problem that not so easy to solve (and one that Marxists have singluar cocked up for the last 150 years or so)

In this marx is right...

2009-07-08T22:11:00.000-07:00

This last point of Marx of course has a great del of power to it. The self as in the pompous hegelian this is ME might be highly problematic. It is that bit of a me that drives bourgeois society on, and makes it function as it does. It make it demanding.

However the second rubric of the self, which ted it to the gentle empiricist pitching what they are in the world, opens one up to the idea that ones identity does always bleed across the world. Modesty demands as much. That is it demands not that I am, but rather that what I am mves and shifts across a world. What I then feel about myself and my actions, about what i is to have an effect, and what it is to be effected in todays world, is rather different from what it was before. My actions have different effects, my power toreach others is different, my realtion with any sort of external world is also very very diffeent.

l of which goes with out saying: Well after Marx said it we all took it as read.

That this in a sense is the problem with the history of a future. he novels written their are frustrating in that one reads them, one takes on what they are saying on board, if becomes a ready platitude and one forgets its fiery origins. the world is full of Marxists who know it not...

But here Max licks his lips.He knows he always aims to say something richer in his works. That is to have odd treasures hidden within the long and complex prose that most simply will never read. ha way one reward those who actually study with other truths than the one that is readily accepted, other insists into the re-vamping o the self within the machine.

However it needs to be said that although Dickens accept the logic of the empirical changing human and the machine, he doubts where any series of changes will ever be enough to mitigate that bourgeois self-man and self conciousness: If a revolution works peoples must act to make it happen, and what will they think about those actions?

Will they be merely bound by determinism?

Bound by pride? Or bound by some unspecified feeling of the future - but where then Dickens asks can one get this feeling? where does it come from?

How acan ti be born?

Marx has an answer...

2009-07-08T21:54:00.000-07:00

Marx no doubt thinks this worry about identity is rather bourgeois. It is precisely the kind of problem he thinks will vanish in his state.

And yet this is a big claim.

Marx knows that Dickens is the great chronicler of what it is to be human for his time.

That is what it is to live in the nineteenth century, and have nineteenth century thoughts.

Dickens is therefore right for his time.

that goes without saying.

And yet it is not what the revolution calls for.

That revolution needs is not the novels of the present, but rather the books of the future.

And it is the job of Marx's peculiar brand of economy, storytelling and philosophy that is right them

This job is utterly proactive. One does not get the future one chooses without stocking the past with the right types of critiques: The right movements and thoughts.

These thoughts then need to be blend across an emerging thinking process, or a series of definition about what it is to be human.

Once this movement has occurred then and only them is it time to talk about the kind of Self conscious act that a revolution might take.

One needs then to write the novels of the future, make the myths for revolution - make revolution and its protagonists truly revolutionary. Before ever one can even think on acting.

Hence he might say Das Captail, and the Eighteenth Brumair: What are these but novels for the future?

the two prisoners

2009-07-06T23:50:00.000-07:00

Dickens has a second problem with the Marxian appeal to self consciouseness:

There are two inhabitance of that jail o the self.

One the one hand in that jail in Marseilles there is the individual who self consciously effects his self within others, He therefore operates by a series of effects upon other which then force them or better oblige them to behave in a certain way (The Blandios moustache). He then interprets this behaviour as somehow to his credit or as a testiment that the world shoud always conform to his hopes and expectations of it.

To be self conscious was then the have an effect, and a powerful one on others and the revel in that effect on sees then in their reaction not what they themselves thought, but only your impression upon them. On sees then only ones power and how it was effected. One does not actually care what they were at all. A self is the effected in forcing the reaction of other.

That is as I make a world in my mind to be in. I must se that world reflected in the action of others and through them, If it is i become egostical and unpleasent: To be a powerful self as such, to feel is then not to care for a consequence.

On the other hand their is the dreamy man of perception. He knows that the world beyond him is open and varied He has been therefore here or there or anywhere. He wanders. The is sustained then in his wondering by the fact that at any one time he can create a little mirror to himself in a fantasy. He can eat the his own words, or but if meat out of a hunk of bread. His self consciousness is therefore his power of dreaming. tht s of hpo ghtta the orl might be otherwise.

His self is then that self affection, that touching ourselves or dreaming for ourselves we all do, when the world is complex, in the hope that he dreams might become reality. His perception or himself in this loop in this self as affected in a hoop, is but the dream of a dream. it function not to make him more active but rather to open him up to others. A dream carried out is a dream alone, which then makes him responsive to others and look s their action and their behaviour for elements that might echo that dream: his dreams his doing it to himself therefore opens him to the wills and minds of others.

Here then dickens says are two very different forms of self consciousness: To be conscious of ones action and of one dreams are really not the same thing To merely then hope for that moment of Hegelian revelation when history becomes aware of itself, is to beg the question, which awareness is this? A question which cannot be answered, and yet which will have very great relevence to any outcome or any hope for the future...

The boundless

2009-07-05T22:55:00.000-07:00

Dickens and Marx essentially play the same game.

Both want to understand how something utterly boundless tumbles into the world. Industrialization does something weird to nature. Nature stops being something that ought to be understood either in terms of a divinity or a fixed series of cycles, and becomes rather a filed of power, which industrialization gradually inhabits. The power of nature fractured or plunders, becomes the power of a humanity who appears able to rewrite some of the rules of life (epidemics become less serious, power becomes a resource to be held on tap etc.)

A world of ever expanding and complexifying network of powers and machines, replaces an only order., and both Marx and Dickens realize that such a network must fundamentally alter how humans understand their place in the world.

How could it not? Suddenly new powers become open, and new problem and opportunites arise: What it is to hold down an identity or to relate to ones fellows suddenly became richer and more difficult. Population rocket, and mix, new lines of communication are created, new ways one can influence ons fellow, and new ways to force them to do things.

The perpetual tumble of natures power into the laps of a population forces the existing powers of that population not examine themselves. They cannot imply assume that they are the ones, that they are the power in the land. other powers,better to wield technologies could always be quietly being born. Power structure becomes then very precarious. The threat is not rebellion and revolt the taking charge of the state by specific elites) but rather full scale revolution ( the sudden and violent change in the nature of the society).

But this change is going to be so complete. But is likely that the revolutionaries will not understand their power. They will rather be simply doing what they always had done, or hoping to or trying to, as the rules slipped and changed, and revolutionised that 'always'. The agent of change are never necessarily meaning to be that change.

Or at least they are nt Max says until socialisms becomes self confident of of its power. I is this self consciosunes on the behalf of technology to be the power, the change, and humanity to understand itself as the wielder of this technology that compose or form the nature of the revolution. That is communisms happens and history ends when humanity self-consciously assume its power to own its own technology.

But here Dickens eye brows meet. There is a problem and he knows it. Marx is asking far too much of self consciousness or reason. Technologies work by eroding what humans thought they could do. It warps then habits or makes then function otherwise. This power is one of genuine revolution: that is it runs against how hans tend to understand themselves. Its power is that surprise. If one merely jumps the of the habit of self conscious desire for change, then one has changed in a sense nothing. This will be a habit. one will look to change as the answer, and forget that what actually matters is he fact that changes are eroding what was already there. They work in not being self-conscious as such. That is in warping reality. to make then the reality to be warped is therefore a solution.

Not only does it mistake the nature of the change (which needs to warp) but also the relationship between humanity, with their little lives and neat order, and the nature that is bought into those wold. This nature will not simply cease being nature, in that it will always be a challenge. , and in a sense this is its revolution and well as its definition. That is the Marx's strong argument that nature becomes a field to inhabit needs to keep hold of the fact that nature in doing so remains as it was, the indexes of possibility and changes beyond humanity. one might not contain that beyond in divinity or in cycles and yet that does not stop the beyond being real and vivid. It matters.

Natures power therefore remains in the sense that it is the step beyond self consciousness, and to be human. The oddities of modernity is that this other is perpetually being invited into society. The problem is how does one relate to this often rather unwelcome guest. ...

Max says change everything to become its friend: Dickens that such a change is not possible or desirable as some guests are too grumpy to be placated, and one can never simply alter ones self: one needs rather to cope and live with the gripe and snipe of the guest.

History at leas t now has suggested that this second approach, might be the only one possible....

Nailing the lie

2009-07-02T22:53:00.000-07:00

When did the free market die?

it is a real question Marx thinks.

The free market dies he says the minute the workshop gave way to the factory and the dominant unite of production,

In a workshop world a series of process each produce a commodity that others take up. Money therefore flows from one individual to another, to another process ,and everyone is genuinely free to sell elsewhere.

The factory is a rater different model, The division of labour might be there (and the factor will be very productive in producing new and different divisions). What is though so different i that the commodity is only produced at the end of the product. In a factory therefore each process automatically leads o the next. There are no finished products (until the end). There is no point therefore that the goods produced are sold to the next down the line.

The factory as then a very different rhythm of the workshop. It is the set up of the capitalism (or coorpeative), which comes together and sets up the dead labour which infuses the process. t has then an initial out lay; it produces as a commodity a single good. This good is then sold. But between these two there s as little buying and selling as possible, the only thing ought is labour time, and yet the capitalist has the whip hand here. By and large they can ensure that the labour so bought is always bought at the cheapest prices possible (possibly even survival wages). Th free market in labour is then one that favours the capitalist. what is more the old system where the labour of the workers was in itself valuable (as it added skill is of course no more. In a full mechanized system any old idiot, genius or performing chimp can do any task.

Behind the free market was then the assumption hat there were genuine skills, which individuals could own and which gave them certain power within the system. Without this world of individual small scale producers and this eden of value, Marx says any free market is likely to be at best unfair and at worse non existent. It will be the former as the power relations between the various parties to it are so different. A company or a bank has so much clout; they do not need individual buisness - they could always go elsewhere or to the government. Each company has then a power which forces individuals to conform and forces them into certain fixing deals. Or again what companies pay workers is set by the fact that a company can find their workers anywhere (they can always move the jobs elsewhere), while the workers always need to live.

But the market usually breaks down (at least in part) This is because the individual production process has not market within it. a factory is a process not a sequence of markets: and Marx says one of the tendencies of capitalism is to produce a world which is a single macro machine ( tendency while he thinks if not real that a single market). The free market is then at best peripheral to this system and at worse a lie which allows it to flourish.

That is it is the lie that everyone is buying and selling something, and that the system is therefore fair. Ir hides the fact that there is no real market in the process, an what is being paid for labour is appalling cheap.

Doctrine of the free market hide the very real power relations that infuse the system, and prevent it being remotely free or fair. As such the words free market become a justification and an apology for an 'apparently' necessary act of oppression.

What is more any occupation that sees itself even for he flicker of an eye as a production process is likely to slip into a factory mode;. This is surely one of the thinks that happen with banks. They saw their role not to produce a fee market in whatever, but rather to produce money as if that money, that production, the production of capitalism itself as a produce. This production of production defied the free market as such. one needed not to think what one was buyingor the value of anything, one needed of merely 'produce' and carry on producing money. The entire system then eventually collasped, as the actual 'free air' of the market (or what people really ought to be paying for these properties broke across the system

Marx therefore asks a really important question. What if, he says the two dominant ideas of our times the free market and the factory floor said radically different thing, and opened on different old. the former necessarily introduced other element into a transaction (someone will have skills to sell, or will before buying think what they buy, buyers are therefore rational), while the later will have its power lie through ensuring a lack of choice and a dominance of a certain system to the detriment of all others, and does so even as it expands to devour all other options. These models are of course very uneven in their matching. The free market has a certain romantic appeal, in the same way the knight templar does or Ancient rome. it is a system who heyday was a mythical world of artisan and guilds. A day long gone (if it were ever there). The problem is that no one has told it that. or rather the problem is that it has become the only say way to understanding the laws of buying and selling. That is the point commodities enter the system of capital. The factory floor, by contrast, the only way we currently understand production (or almost the only way). it power then lies in defining rules by which that production process can be expanded and modified.

Here then is a real contradiction inherent within a 'system': capitalism is caught between two different models, that of how it buys and sells and that how it produces: Marx's point is that any such system is necessarily very unstable and likely to frequent collapse. The gamble them of Max the communists is that somewhere and a some time a series of theorems might bubble up that articulate these two elements of our society rather more easily one with the other. e knows however such a theorem will take time. It will be born out of the develops of the system and cannot be simply rushed. He merely knows it ought o be possible: it ought to happen. All of course we can say is that with him we are still waiting.

a Macarbe thing

2009-07-02T22:27:00.000-07:00

Perhaps capitalism owes more to Lovecraft that Dickens, Marx wonders.

At its heart it has a body which is composed of for elements.

Firstly this body, the body of capitalism itself - the ever expanding land. Money is that which as it is given splits and changed, that which oozes over a land, corroding it in new places, dissolving what was there, converting every thing into money. it is then the most corrosive of acid goos, and one that know no limit of containment; It bubbles up for God know what well and covers a land.

Secondly within this goo are endless disjointed lives. Individuals are then workers, and as workers they are its organs. That it they are what generates its body, what fashions it. they are what is spinning out the goo. The system therefore only exists as it disjoints then individuals within it; they cease to be people, and become mere gizzards or brain pans:Organs within which and through which it slime is spun.

Thirdly surrounding these workers are the macarb elements of dead labour. work done once and for all, and never to be animated or thought. work finishes and complete. The living flow onto the dead and then hook up with life elsewhere. Who is alive and who is dead in this machine might not be clear. jobs shift and change, have dying elements now dead elements. One process changes and alters is once alive and then dead. the monument of the machine is therefor regarding very unquiet spirits. The labour might be dead, but its death wraps up the land starting it, making it infect the living, and driving backwards and forwards around and around.

Fourthly the body of capital pulsated.It glissens and which it is runs numerous separate individual process as its tendrels. one makes then a product, and so is bound up within a continuity of actions, one going into the other. Other make the same product or elements form it or inputs for it. The entire system flows one into the other, one across the other. As each point thereofore, each organ, each process appears o be a part of a continuity. one us swept along a process. one is this then that then this. But each such continuity only is as it is swept up in a great and ever pulsating whole where processes change and alter, shift, spilt avoid and affirm. The system as a whole continually multiple orders and shifting patterns, even those each local element of it appears so rational and complete.

Finally the pulsating whole has no fixed form. That does without saying. But the oddity its worse then a that. deep within, very deep, there are strange movements, slides and reality, slipping away, or moving odd wards. Rubles in meaning or for. The process, these ever revolution, change the shape of the entire ooze from within - disrupting it, or pulling this way or that, making it other or different. It oozes explosively, and violently, it change is form or texture if always expands, and yet what that explain is, what that expansion captures is never the same.

This is then the old one of capitalism: the glissening truth that some might claim was beyond time and space (and the natural destiny of Man): A lie Marx would like to nail.

necro-archies

2009-07-01T22:48:00.000-07:00

Forget the slightly twee characters, or even the highly convoluted stories: what really hold a dickens novel together is the patchwork of deaths, that construct it.

Take for example Nicholas Nickleby. This is a story suspended between two rather distinct deaths:That of the elder Nicholas Nicklebly and the young Ralph.The plot arises as a consequence the former and as the path towards he latter. This double take of death as legacy or path s the repeated (if a different sense) in the case of Arthur Brice and Smike. The latters death allows or better defines how Madeline will marry Nicholas (it is therefore a death with myriad consequences), while the latter death, of Smike is a point which the entire novel build up to. Every knows that Smike ill die, the problem is always ho long will it take.

Death rules in two ways I overhangs a novel and individuals are caught up in the legacy of how someone died, and the reaction to that death - or else is marks the point that the action must lead. that is the point beyond all escape, the point which gets closer and closer, as a thing inevitable, and yet unknowable until it happen. A double take Dickens repeats in Bleak house (lady deadwood death is the point build up to, while her husbands death or the miser's death are point from which the plot spins); or again in tale or to cities ( the death of the child run over by Evermond or of the family of Madame Defarge, an the death of Sidney Carton) or even Great expectations (the death of Pip's parents, the death of his second father Magwitch).

Relatively rarely this double of death is caught in the same act of dying: So the death of Paul Dombey is at once a point everyone knows will happen, a point the story fizzles rather quickly towards, but also the legacy,which overhangs the rest of the book : in the same book another option is also investigated: the death might be aborted or falls. Dombey nearly kills himself (which would have been the culmination of the story), while the' hero' returns from the dead (he was thought drowned, and yet was not).

Nor need these death be very far apart, or even in a logical order. In Nicolas Nickleby The death of mr Dorrit is clearly point the story has lead (even though the path was hidden). The man ruined by wealth,comes to the end that ruin brings him. The death of the Banker, which ruins the Dorit fortune is clearly a death which matter, which is defined in legacy. But this legacy a legacy which sweeps up Dorrit's fortune in it, interupts the 'Legacy; that mr Dorrit;s death would otherwise create. His death is then robbed of it own legacy or another is replaced by another death another legacy. His dying then although not at the end of the novel is made o be an end. his death marks the end of wealth, and is mingled in the legacy of run that follows the death of the Banker Murdle.

Death can be then complex and yet rules life in two ways: life is either the legacy of a death. It s it is that which comes after- that which lives in the legacy of dying. To live is therefore to be surrounded by death. One lives, one acts as a momument - an element caught or suspended between differing deaths. What one is and how one lives is defined within this patchwork of legacies of different way of dying.

Alternatively death is the final point every life runs to. It is the last act. The faltering point of novel or a being. The point beyond which and from which evrything is forever different. The point then the lot twists and turns towards.

Death rules not because in either case these are simple the death of folk. it is not characters that make the death, do much as the act of dying sweeps the characters along of force them to sing a new song. Death as an event , beyond the mind, makes mind bend towards its direction. Nor are these deaths exactly singular events: the death of Smike and the Ralph Nickleby are caught up in each other, as are the death of Murdle and Mr Dorrit (or the deaths of Riderhood and much earlier the Gaffer). A death does not need then to be simple. My and your dying might become one,. That is they might infuse legacy (the of The Madame Defare's sister and he death of the child are all markers on the path to the guillotine). Or one death might be seen as merely a path to another (anotehr will be a local point of it own all the same: The death of Smike leads to the death of Ralph Nickelby.

Death id not necessarily singular. it has a an effect. It build towards itself or demands a legacy, it has a past r a future but never simply alone. Other dying are also their. It might then be a necro-archy, bur it is never the one death that governs. I might snuff it alone, by a dy always and at each point with other around m, or I ought to.

Death is the point i live within or the point I am gathered towards: it is the dead labour of a machine or the ghost that haunts society, the ghost of a death to come - a revolution. Death in its two voices it is political, and Marx is one the apostles of that politics.

at which point...

2009-06-30T23:32:00.000-07:00

Marx here snort-

he has Dennis taped. Denis the man whose work is death, and who wears the clothes of dead men is the living embodiment of the capitalist machine: a machine is clothed in the dead labour of mechanical force and power, and yet composes a natural force that strangles the unfortunate individuals whose labour it needs.

The social work of the 'Boot' is the caught up in the sinister game of death. That is social individual is exploded into a machine his labour is articulated against dead labour or made to resonate across dead labour, which he part animates (and at the cost of killing his individuality)

The worker in the capitalist system is a true host, at once dead and alive. Their own life (as individuals) is being starved out of them by the system they are a part of: and yet their own living labour is necessarily to articulate the ghoulish machine they are a part in. To work in a machine, to have an individuality conjured into the machine is therefore to have or be part of an individual which is organic and mechanic but also living and dead. That is ones social live is caught up making the dead live (the machine works) while one individuality, is caught up in the process of actually dying (the system stares its workers).

Capitalism is therefore the system that makes our own collectivity a potential enemy, or monster. No wonder then it does not want to understand the 'spiritual' or ghostly side of life - that is the meta individual: It needs such ''folk' only to be the provenance of the capitalist, they are his slaves, the lifes he used to animate dead force: No wonder then it clothes individuality in inadequate tools. It needs the individual to pitch themselves in the wrong place, so that they cannot understand their own assassination in the system. Notions such as mankind are an effective castration of the worker: they make them crave a democracy that will never save them - that will only make the problem worse. They therefore leave unchallenged the capitialists ownership of their social life. It is this element, this owning that Marx sees as his enemy. The social human must be freed for the capitalist (if not the machine), and therefore made into the individuals friend, and not as they are at the moment their direst enemy.

Understanding the sense in which the world of work takes us necessarily beyond ourselves thereby becomes very very very very serious....

Beyond humanity part 1

2009-06-30T22:44:00.000-07:00

Marx has an answer to both Dickens and the anarchist.

To be a human he says in a capitalist society is not simple.

The capitalist has bifocal vision in regards to humanity.

one the one hand Marx conceds there are those humanities of the everyday: That is those biological unites who need to eat and wipe there bums and everything These humans are then ones then that come to the market place to sell their labour.

they are even the ones the capitalist pays. They are certianly the one that various ideologies and opiates fixiate.

However there are not the humans that the capitalist actually hires. Marx has a very strong line here. Humanity en masse is not the same humanity as in the individual. They do not work the same, and do not behave the same. The very fact of being a social animal means that between folk other humans, them of en masse, them when their effects upon each other is allowed for, exists.It is then this extra individual, this net effect of pooled individuality that the capitalist directly hires. That is it is the success or not of this individual that will define for the capitalist their profit margins. They need, however they do it, for this individual to produce as much as possible (and always more than the individual peoples involved within it).

Capitalism is the system where is is never individual that are hired, but rather the collective folk created across the effect of social relations. Capitalism itself will take these relations as its productive power. That is the effect of being in a factory and the ins and out of extra production that can create (irrespective at his point of machines) is seen to be the peculiar property of the capitalist and not merely the property of the individual. The meta-folk of the factory floor are then clothed not in flesh and blood but profit. They exist or better are articulated only in their ability to make a profit for someone else. Our collective folk, the child of our cooperation is therefore the natural born slave. Or better it is the role of capitalism to make them appear a necessary slave; their existence in the workshop (and only in the workshop) is the creation of slavery.

But at this point a very deliberate unclarity enters Marx;s account. He clearly delights n listing reasons how and where this additional value comes for, It might be for the competitive instinct of humans to do their best, or the effect of averaging out their differences, or the way they break down their tasks or anything.

In a sense it does not, and cannot matter. What matters is that this effect is there and is real. To find one cause is to miss the point. Or worse it is to attempt to trap in the individual the existence of this extra human that is necessarily beyond individuality (and so not reduced to the process that produced its own individuality).

To breed the monster beyond humanity therefore, one must free oneself of that humanity. That is one will only get a Dennis style beast man if one attempt to lead such a being back towards individuality.

The problem is elsewhere.

The problem that this natural born slave, then serves as the template for a far greater slavery.

Once an extra humanity is created in the factory floor, the rules that link this humanity, to tools and beyond them machines are clearly very flexible : The social human flows into the machines within which their world is articulated very very naturally. Not only is the cooperation of such social folk very like a machine in the first place (it breaks tasks up or makes them run in parallel - humans are then already half machine. or the machine grew out of this social human, and not out of normal individuality) but also as no individual ones that power, it can very easily be take and broken up or articulated differently within machines. That is it can be absorbed within a wide series of improvements which take and mechanicalize aspects of human labour, and their cooperation, and include the cooperative human in the process.

The cooperative human is not therefore merely the natural born slave, they are also the born already as a part in a machine: or perhaps better the machine grew from them; it expresses their trapped collective power therefore. Social humans individuality is therefore lost within the wider story of production (as the machine are then owned by he captialist...)

Capital will thereofore embody not merely the social ghost of an individual, but also the being of an individual who is caught up and articulated across machines. It creates then a folk who are already part mechanical, already bound up in the machine and its effect.

The met-mech- workers are then marx thinks therefore already necessarily beyond human. They are clothed only in profits (which define their individuality), but their beating hearts are necessarily beyond all folk or all specific individuality: The need then to be freed, they need to become natural born monsters, and not merely slaves, for they are the communists to come.

The thin monetray line

2009-06-30T21:43:00.000-07:00

It is always said that the extreme of communism and capitalism loop back on themselves:

One can easily have anarchist of the right and the left: They talk the same talk about survival and individuality. The rant against government and interference in the same voices.

And yet between these two lies a very deep schism. The chasme of individuality and money. A chamse only a hairs breadth wide, and yet uncrossable.

For the leftwing anarchist come communists, anarchy is what follows from the absence of humanity. It is therefore how one character ones being is open to flow into and though others. it is the power to be many things in oneself and through others. one might be 'self reliant' and yet that reliance is merely because one knows one is multi faceted. it reflects then the ability to flow across many mind, and to use other is that flowing. Anarchy reflects then the inestimable ability of humans to share what they are with others, and do so in free form.

On the right the same talk of withdrawal and the same rejection of authority is had, and yet for utterly different reasons. The motivation is not the following of individuality so much as the bastion f the self and the family. One is therefore an anarchist because one is a self. It is in the defence and the defiance of the self that one is and asserts ones being.

As such money to the right wing anarchist is not necessarily wrong. It presents is a sense the codification of their anarchy. That is the medium between all things. A medium of the meta market, and so beyond the state. A medium in which individuals finds their possession announce or discover their freedoms through them. Money therefore is the anarchic flow within which the rightwing individualist wants to pitch a being.

Money is therefore the point at which the rightwing break upon everyone else. that is it is the sole point f trust between themselves and everyone. The point they accept that anarchy needs others, at some point.

The opposite is then the case for the left. Money is the sole point at which all trust all sharing breaks. But is therefore the point at which there is no trust and no value beyond that inspired in the money relation. Money is the point at which the true anarchist ought to turn way (or ought rather to talk about sharing the land). It is the point one cannot have.

This difference is then a very real one. to be an anarchist and belief that one makes ones own laws is in a sense one say nothing. So many humans are there: We all make the empiric laws of our own minds, and tell our own stories within them. The real game is to understand how that position of priveldge links one with everyone. Is the link via an individuality and the one sharing indviduals create, namely money? Or is it because all individuality as all laws are lost in the being of the anarchst. The division then really matter.

The trouble actually is, though with being a human is that it is very difficult to hear this vital difference. The problem then of the chasme between left and right is not that it cannot be bridged but rather that it can a little too easily: Tyrants of all shapes and forms jump over from the right wing to the left: The move is simple- one forgets money (or sees it only for personal gain, and not as a collective thing) , one keeps ones individuality, but the lose sight of everyone elses individual: Others become the facts or numbers on which ones own being is empressed. One becomes then (at least in ones own eyes) the micro-managing master of the universe. Running the other way advertising takes the fact that humanity cannot hold onto its own emotions, and uses this fact to make money or politics with.

Monsters are born at the chamse. Better they naturally flow from it, once it is opened.

And to close such a rift, such a point of difference which cannot be heard, would take a very great conjuring, it would take a revolution; and Marx of course hopes he is the wizard of that particuliar spell.

The heart of humans

2009-06-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

What is t that allows one to say a bundle of pink stuff and a freight of actions is a human?

It is is a real question in Barnaby Rudge

is humanity the ability to hold a memory?

Or is it the ability to be convivial?

or is it faith?

Or loyality?

Or bravery?

Or merely manner.

Well it is clearly all of these, including the last. and yet the last in normal Dickens style illustrates the problem. one might it is true be polite and yet under the venneer of that politeness all kinds of poisons lie. The polite might have a human front and a monsterous interior.

At which point of course the entire enterprise of defining a human reveals its oddity. almost many definition will be localized. it s always easy to define then a human or a self as a something somewhere. The problem is that this somewhere is always a limited space: Around then the go sit many of dark desires and thoughts fencing it in or expanding it: Around reason sits all the motivation all the base thoughts reason justifies. Around morality are all the gut instincts that oppose a humanity the face of their morality. Around a definition such as a laughing animal sits all the other affects we are.

The problem si then not merely that each definition is partial, but also that in giving a rubric for humanity, it gives a lie t that rubric. humans take up that definition and are inhuman around it. That is they use it or fit it into a life beyond that definition ? (where not everything can be human), and musing it then modify their life in the face of it, and to differing advantages.

A definition of humanity cannot be torn apart form life, and as is a myriad and monstrous as that life surely is. Or at ;east as it ought to be.

The end point then of humanity as a definition ought to be a monster: That is the individual who cares nothing about anyone else, and cannot conceive of their individuality or does not worry about this effect upon them. The pure form of humanity s then Chester- the monster of manners.

Perhaps then Dickens wonders one out not to define humanity so much as a create an axis to define where the monsterous is given.If one cannot easily define humanity, perhaps one can create a bestiality of monsters in its place.

Dickens gives you three more options.

On the darkside a man might be a beast. As a beast, the dark figure of Dennis the hangman, who wears his victims clothes and gloats over their deaths is the ultimate figure of inhumanity. he is the nightmare that humanity fears. The 'what will happen' if we abandon the quest for the human.

but Dennis the beast is not the only possible.

The idiot is also their. The idiot, Barnaby, might not in himself have wit, and cannot hold down a steady occupation. And yet. and yet, he gives off a spirit of freedom, and a power to trust. This power, this ability to enter into all lives with the same pride is then the whirl that sets the book going. The power to trans-locate and yet be yourself whatever the context, the power to respond in a space beyond any one self, or any one fixed being, becomes revealed as a potent force.

Finally their is hugh a dark faced, bright hearted centaur.The ultimate victim of a society that condemns his 'type' as already inhuman. he reveals himself none the less capable of sefless love (for Barnaby), a love that redeems him of the verge of the grave- a love beyond himself. But also he is the master of the riot, the lord of chaos and revolution. Wherever the is destruction he is their, monitoring it, 'leading' not by plan but by occasion, and through his own bravery.

In Baraby Rudge three beyond human states appear live and real; in all their creativity and all their folly the beast , the innocent, and the centuar. Marx problem si that he need a fourth The communists, who has al the virtues of their three, without their vices, and does not merely slip for one to the other....

Getting there.

2009-06-30T00:44:00.000-07:00

In the world shattering chapter of Das captial, chapter 15, Marx stars to seriously understand where his blind revolution might come from.

The probe of industrial capitalism is that it gears up two contrasting flows.

The one flow wants to make profit, and needs to squeeze labour to do so Costs must come down, for profit goes up.

The other flow is that of machines. the machine is the principle which allows one to re place the skill of a task with a machine. Each machine therefore as such embodies a rationalized human task. Knitting is therefore broken down into mechanical actions and those actions are then articulated one against another, and made into a mass production process. The affairs of the home and the workshop becomes then affairs of science.

To build a machine is thereofore to convert a human actions into externalized physical reality. it is therefore to drag human action from biology into chemistry and physics.

What s then created is not however Marx insists a simple reduction. True the tasks are broken down, and understood, and yet the tasks remain the same. At the centre of a machine are then the knitting needles or whatever there has always been. It is merely that these needles have been taken out of their human context and made to dance on the wider skies of energy, force and time. The move is therefore not simply reductive. It is rather a means in which small tasks are objectified and then spun across the world as a thing apart. They in a machine have their own life.

Likewise a machine is never a series of bits cobbled together anyhow. On the contrary they are always at every point a continuity. Machines might then nest inside other machines, or might expand into other mechanisms or be caught up in a variety of uses. They might then change what they are, and what they are used for. But in each of these changes the entire point of the machine lies in its homogeneity internally and with other machines. It is therefore always a part of a process greater than it.

Machines therefore not only objectify individual actions, they replace the unity in with those actions; it is not humanity which surround them with their life and their local skill, it is rather then , branch of the wider machine which tasks up a task and orchestrates it against a wider world.

Between then two elements, Capital and machine the gearing up of capitalism lies. Capitalism is the defined within the interaction of these elements; their taking up on one within and through the other. The logic of capitalism is therefore to divide and redivide the human what a human is, and what they can do is being challenged: and Marx, always tuned to historical change knows and welcomes that fact.

What capitalism will do (and how it will undermine itself) is therefore hidden. All we really know is Marx thinks it will happen across the axis of the machines. The unfetterd machine ought, logically enough challenge our very definition of ourselves as separate distinct things. It ought then to open us to another means of living: A means in which our actions cease to be simply our own, but ratherr are taken for what they are, a part in the cog of a wider society. A society which who knows might end up being truly communist.

The process has of course taken far longer than Marx thought: but maybe this is because humanity is more complex? That is it has more level to loose or to objectify in the machine that Marx allowed for. The human then re-asserts itself in these remenants. Alternatively of course it might be the case that humanity is not an idea which dies this way. It strives then become mechanicalized or better recreates itself and its desire to own everything elsewhere, in which case Marx would never be right and Communism would not happen here: or else would happen, but elsewhere humanity would still insist in its power to own (but do it elsewhere). That is the human would change were it was felt. Mechanism would become collective (a multi national, or a state might be such a machine, the global community, are all such communisms),a and yet elsewhere the individual would still insist on its right to be and so bugger up everything if that included the right to conjure itself over political language, belief and so powers.

Dickens' Reply...

2009-06-28T22:31:00.000-07:00

Dickens new just as much as Marx that the only real change in their times, to only change that mattered was the industrial one.

In Dombey and son therefore Dickens suggests four principle of industrialization.

1) firstly it is random, choatic and patchwork. The revolution errupted across london, forcing change and challenge. It made then a world where things were necessarily different and yet that difference was unexpected. Old ways gave to new utterly distinct and yet juxtapose with them, with no order or pattern. Life's unity was the a t once shattered, and yet the parts still lived in their fractured bits. The new does not utterly destroy the old or replace it, it merely explodes it.

2) Each process is then akin to a mini-death. To listen to a train, to flow its beat in verse is to here the echo of time and the changes of time. It is that which destroys what was. that which explodes. That which takes one on journies where if one returns at all everything is different. The rhytmm of this change, is then the tread of death. What is touched is forever altered. what remains remains only suspended. It might carry on as if nothing had changed. In a sense given change is death for it it cannot to other than this. And yet it is likely enough in the end death will come for it (as only politics and banking look set to escape).

3) The change empowers odd people. Those then who live through it, and becoming its working class have new rights and abilities. They can reachacrss old divides and arrange things differenelty. Industrial change challenges the social order and must do so.

4) Finally industrialization is the strangest of punts on the future. we are like an inventor who has a number of bets on what will be. The shrimpy boat will not doubt one day come it. and yet when and were we do not know. It will happen...sometime and somewhere. To live in the industrial world is therefore to live knowing that somewhere there is an inventor, making something to change everything - and yet that person is hidden and will be hidden until their invention breaks onto a world, jangling it otherwise..

Revolution take two.

2009-06-28T21:50:00.000-07:00

The problem the Brumiar insists is not that revolution stands upon a cusp of time. Or problem as revolutionaries is that we do not know what they ought to look lie now. If one then follows the old schemata for revolutions, then Dickens is right.

The power of the revolution is ultimately to dislocated a society into factions, factions that they play out a drama beyond reason or point.

However Marx suggests that is not all are revolution need be.

One the contrary what one needs to aim for is something far more vivid, and real. A revolution that does not relax into a language, A revolution that will have the rewored the rules of on,w a revolution needs to be thought as it occurs.A revolution that cannot then be contained within a past, and is not 'over' in its radical phaze the moment it breaks out.

Marx therefore present us with the need to rethink revolution. Or better to rethink the nature of exactly who the revolutionary is. Maybe the old profession, is not enough. One genuinely uncalled and unbidden, and yet timely, a revolt needs to come from the blue, and in the giving not merely re-throw the past, it also needs to form a radical break with it. It must then not merely be the words which force what was to appear to be that which lead one forward. It must rather be that which ends the past, and breaks with it. That change which, like industrialization makes the past utterly unthinkable.A revolt which makes words meaningless and empty, and ghosts powerless.

A revolution not then of political stridency, but one of those other revolution of technology.

That is Marx's model is surely the industrial revolution. A revolution whose time and place is impossible to pin down. A revolution that was named (or mis named) across an epoch. a revolution which sunk into the consciousness of the manufacturing peoples only after the event ( of else as a political word, a moment of policy within a number of events). The revolutions, the type of revolution, Marx really values are then the blind silent revolutions of technology: Remember when Marx wrote the term industrial revolution was not known. The changes he saw everywhere lacked cogency. They formed the a blind revolt; a sequence of nameless mythless changes.

A revolution like the one we are in at the moment(which combines; broad band; to worry about climste change and appropriate technology to bio chemistry as engineer to complexity theory, to ....,A revolution all around us, but one that not be known yet) but will surely have some kind of age at some point.

Dickens might then have revolution as event right but Marx insists, but such events do not cover all events. There are those revolts which are different from revolutions as events. There are this nameless silent sequence of interlinked changes that occur as a seed of technological change is such that humans need and use moving categories to think think (and so assume change, an thereby make it possible),. Real revolution, the final revolution will occur then when this change echoes into political language. That is when it subsumes an event within a sequence of changes, that cannot be exactly located.

Marx's gambit is then that this move, this throw of humanity into a technological type revolution is possible. Our problem then of course is simple. is this possibility like the second coming- and always possible but actual or does its very possible make political revolution powerful?

A problem to mull over.

One Solution

2009-06-26T21:44:00.001-07:00

Dickens suggests three moments of revolution in Tale of Two cities (moments which have a power in spite of the dodgy history which surround them)

The First: The forming of the language. Before the revolt, das captial needs to be written and a language found to name the sins of the current system. This language is essential both collective and creative. It is shared by would be enemies; Defarge and Darnley, Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre, and Seyies. all have a hand in the developing and the using of it. But the language is also creative. In linking together passions, words, perceptions and actions it creates a real world. It makes a sin. It becomes the way that emotion is expressed, and miseries caught in truth. It becomes therfore the reality into which the mind is poured . It gives the way to understand the world, and therefore the nature of truth.

It is a language characterized by Irony and scorn. The old reality is withered and forced by laughter and mocking to concede that really it is at a loss to understand the world and name passions and worlds. Scorn therefore scours language and forces a debate elsewhere.

The second moment comes with the event itself. In the event a person or a set of circumstances becomes the dark precursor that created the lightening strike . Under their gaze everything changes. The event reached into that old (collective) language and purifies(or splits) it: words become unsayable or else cannot said in that fashion, while new forced languages are born. It reaches into the past and forces that past to become what was making it alone . It becomes then fate. Here of course is a real irony. The event itself, that is exactly what happened is contigent and often the active creation of a small number of individuals, and yet the action itself, once it happens will demand that the past warp and change in how it is viewed. The past becomes that which created what followed. it becomes the oil in which the event was sown. It becomes the pathway to it. It is forced therefore to allow or what was not in it, or not in that form, the event that happened.

The event is therefore the moment the past is bent into a certain present; it is the point at which a language is made to say only one thing : the point Mirabeau and then Seyies and then Danton fall away form the revolution that is Robespierre. It is the moment at which time is forced onwards. The terror; The point history and all its effects need to change once and for all.

The third moment, the aftermath happens as the event is itself absorbed as a fact into other lives. Those whose language is utterly changed by events have in a sense the last laugh. They must for ever allow for it, and cannot return quite to what they were. And yet they have the power in communicating and understanding the event to change how it is viewed. This change is pivotal. It is the nature of the initial event to be divide. It is after all the moment history splits. Something new occurred. Older or merely other views are then crushed or dismissed or destroyed. The event is that which divided. But the reaction to the event is somewhat different: minds which the event initially divided come together to understand their division, and so locate the event within a personal but also a wider history. The event becomes then shared in spite of itself. It becomes collective. The solitary masters who expressed it are then robbed of their power (and often their lives). They represent the split and not the reaction to the split. A world might then have changed (and it will not change back), and yet it never need change in quite the way the revolters wanted .

In a sense it cannot.

The moment the event is open to history itself (and not merely re-throwing fate), this much is clear. For exactly happened, and what should follow from that happening is always an open question in the fluxes of the world. It changes as many people inhabit and do so differently.

In a sense this difference is the events great legacy.It marks the splitting off of a language into other languages, other takes different communions, different takes on the event,. The event thereofore takes the collective talk of revival and potential enemies and transform it across a history into a set of closed affairs and defined constitutions (in nations or in families). It defines then a series of limits and creates a language for those limits.

The great events of the state become then a thing for school kids to debate over, or politicians to use as a badge of identity - until that it the process starts again.

This then for Dickens was Marx's error. He failed to realize what he was the master of. He was the master of the creation of a language for capturing the essence of a time; The problem of capitalism; He is then one of the thinkers creating out of the diverse languages the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth century created a single language, in which many voices can be heard. This project is the one he shared with Dickens (but also Darwin). What Marx was not the master of was however revolution.: but then it is a role which at least half of Marx (the man of the british library would have surely relished).

Fracturing of time take 2

2009-06-26T01:34:00.000-07:00

At another place in das capital, Marx merrily will allow capitalism to that times increase the value of labour. If something happens, some increase in the power of production such that the capacities of the machine to use labour increaes more than the actal number of of workers, then BINGO! - the price of labour goes up. Machines and technology drive the show foward, and Marx assures us in real terms the realtive value of machines over labour always increase. The big new machines are then very expensive and complex. They need more workers, but then cost more in themselves. They increase the price of labour (for everyone) while also increasing the realtive vlaue of machines over the labour force in certian industries.

At the bottom line therefore the rise in the value of labour is merley one stepping stone in the over all devaluing of labour, as machines becoming increasingly important.

And yet haunting Marx ideas are two further points not explict, but implied here.

Firstly there is no real natural limit on what can be produced. If after all humans are really using the powers of nature to produce, what those powers can make, and how humans can use it is flexible: newness therefore tumbles into the entire scheme at every opportunity. New machines are endlessly being born, machines then then makes use of labour. The capitalist's system is also often (but not always) in need of labour. It can always do more (it has implied virtualities) than its population money and people for. It is after all tricky question. What rises quicker, the population (with is explontenial expansion curve) or ideas with God know what factorial expansional curve.

Marx therefore implies that ideas and the machines they create, tumbling from the skies, might always change everything, and keep a living poplation (and its labour) always valueble.

They might... So long as the options remain real and open. This is of course the horror in the climate change argument. The argument is that there really might be a natural limiter to things - a point or a timescale to change. A place where change becomes difficult from or next to impossible.

This in turn feeds into the second concession Marx implicitily makes. In a world where money is always relative, one might always gamble of the future. That is, one might found part of the system, at least, on the punt that ideas will always outstrip the population's labour capacity. If this is true then the economy will of course alway expand. Any debt one has now will (even given interest) naturally lessen with time. It will be more able to be paid as the economy expands.... one can therefore bet agianst this expansion, and include it within the over all picture.

This betting on future expansion, will then further mitigate the apparent harshenss of capitalism (or will for a group of people in the west -for the lucky ones). The future is a bright presence, a point to gamble with.

From which perspective the recent credit-crunck cum peakoil, cum environmental scare cum depression cum recession makes some sort of sense. The moment we stopped trusting in the role of ideas to answer any and every emergency, then entire enterprise collasped.

States felt they had to step in to give us some kind of future (and got caught up in the over all mistrust, or a least did in Britian), and here we are.

We now face the problem- what do we really think about those futures? Are we going to bet on ideas again? or global iron necessity (and so risk revolution). Captialism has no choice It must choose the former or risk that other brain child of Marx coming to the fore again. The twin problems we then face are a) do we agree with this equation and b) if we do not agree is there very much we could do about it?

A problem for genuine revoltionaries everywhere....

Marx's eyes

2009-06-26T00:03:00.000-07:00

Your money but whose time?

I suppose it took nearly 100 years to happen - which cannot be bad - but why it happened can be learned from reading Das Capital.

Marx defines exchange value in terms of the hours one spends in the production of good. A thing cost more (or ought to cost more) if it takes longer to produce. Capitalism is then in a very real sense for Marx the system in which individuals exchange, one with the other, the hours of their lives. What makes it powerful is then that by my putting some of the hours of my life at your disposal, you get to be, and do more things. You can have shoes without being a cobbler, or law without being a lawyer, or travel without too much hassle. Capitalism is therefore in Marx’s argument so powerful because it exists as a way of pooling human action. Our lives become in the exchange of commodities caught up with and able to use one another.

Marx has two natural limits’ of this pooling

The first of these limits is the assumption that their will always be a medium, a tangible reality, which forms the gold standard of exchange. There needs then he suggests to be a product whose production is difficult and availability is relatively scarce. This product forming the standard against which all others are valued. Gold and silver therefore form a single yardstick, or monetary clock against which the value of an action was measured.

Secondly Max suggests there must be somewhere in the system some group of people who are working for mere subsidence. Sweat shops form then the basic unit of production in the system. Their role is therefore to literally ‘price’ the value of profit. This is because that while the amount they are paid is fixed (by their biological) need, what that labour is used for And how productive is might be) is open, and can change. Technological advance is therefore able to make the same group of workers achieve more, for the same basic pay. A capitalists profits lie then in getting more form their workers for the same or less pay.

Over the century and three quarters since Marx’s time this last limit has been slowly mitigated or perhaps watered down. The number of workers paid subsistence has been reduce (although somewhere in the system there will always be those workers). A capitalist found that they make profit by merely ‘underpaying’ their work force. That is, by agreeing with the work force that it is a part of their role to increase what they can do for the same basic pay (that is to make productivity increase the condition of employment)..

Likewise for around a century we have lacked the gold standard, and it has all appeared to work.

And yet, for Marx at least the lack of these limit or the removal of one and watering down of the other ought to have been critical, for without these limit who can say what value to put on the hour of a life? Are they not actually ‘valueless’? Or is not their use value beyond any price? How can they be judged if not against either one particularly dangerous and difficult job (gold production?). or the ‘cost; of subsidence?

The temptation grows up either to over pay workers (the city was rater prone to this),; or pay them in kind (expenses); or to encourage them to double their money through credit.

That is, it is the role of credit to express this ambivalence. This is because, when it is no longer clear what could compensate one frittering ones a life away at job, credit became an appropriate ‘additional’ pay. Credit in effect doubles or trebles the (exchange) value of ones pay. It opens one up to greater possibilities in the present, at the cost of miring one further and further within the (purely relative) system. One stopped working for the here and how, and rather got caught up in a system where one pay now pays for past debt; and/or ones pay now allows one to make purchases based on future work. All the draconian and spartan Rhyme and reason Marx was so aware of, was therefore excluded from the system (as was of course the revolution) .

A system without any real ground was created. A system waiting to crash. A fact that surely spawned three further mysteries: Why did it take so long? How can we find a way to pool our labor now ? And finally can we ever actually produce a system that moves beyond that problem of sweat shops? Or will subsidence wages, that produce profit by squeezing the poorest people in the system, to produce ‘real’ profits, become once again our only possible redemption? They suffer so we can thrive...